Earth

Grounding-line retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from inner Pine Island Bay 'unprecedented'

Over the last few decades, melting of West Antarctic glaciers has contributed significantly to global sea-level rise. Since 1992, two major outlet glaciers have experienced up to 25 km of landward retreat of their "grounding line," the position at which the glacier margin starts to float.

Late Pleistocene tropical Pacific temperature sensitivity to radiative greenhouse gas forcing

Understanding how global temperature changes with increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, or climate sensitivity, is of central importance to climate change research.

Climate models provide sensitivity estimates that may not fully incorporate slow, long-term feedbacks such as those involving ice sheets and vegetation. Geological studies, on the other hand, can provide estimates that integrate long- and short-term climate feedbacks to radiative forcing.

Silver Creek caldera -- The tectonically dismembered source of the Peach Spring Tuff

Charles Ferguson and colleagues describe the discovery of a volcano in the Mojave Desert of the southwestern United States that has implications for understanding the mechanism for super-eruptions, a class of volcanic eruption that taps very large (greater than 100 cubic kilometers) amounts of magma in a very short period of time (hours to days).

Pacific fishing zones -- lifeline for overfished tuna?

Marine zoning in the Pacific Ocean, in combination with other measures, could significantly improve numbers of heavily overfished bigeye tuna and improve local economies, a fish modelling study has found.

Preserve the services of mangroves -- Earth's invaluable coastal forests, experts urge

Experts are urging policy makers to preserve mangroves and their essential services to nature and humanity alike, saying their replacement with shrimp farms and other forms of development is a bad economic tradeoff both short and long-term.

Climate change increases stress, need for restoration on grazed public lands

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Eight researchers in a new report have suggested that climate change is causing additional stress to many western rangelands, and as a result land managers should consider a significant reduction, or in some places elimination of livestock and other large animals from public lands.

Warming temperatures will change Greenland's face

Global climate models abound. What is harder to pin down, however, is how a warmer global temperature might affect any specific region on Earth.

Dr. Marco Tedesco, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York, and a colleague have made the global local. Using a regional climate model and the output of three global climate models, they predict how different greenhouse gas scenarios would change the face of Greenland over the next century and how this would impact sea level rise.

Plants and soils could exacerbate climate change as global climate warms

WASHINGTON — November 13, 2012 — Scientists from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated that plants and soils could release large amounts of carbon dioxide as global climate warms. This finding contrasts with the expectation that plants and soils will absorb carbon dioxide and is important because that additional carbon release from land surface could be a potent positive feedback that exacerbates climate warming.

Optical boomerangs, ultralight fractal materials, and more

Optical Boomerangs

P. Aleahmad et al.

Physical Review Letters (forthcoming)

P. Zheng et al.Physical Review Letters, 109, 193901 (2012)

Bending light around corners is usually done with mirrors, but now scientists have realized self-bending light beams that propagate along curved paths.

CU-NOAA study shows summer climate change, mostly warming

Analysis of 90 years of observational data has revealed that summer climates in regions across the globe are changing -- mostly, but not always, warming --according to a new study led by a scientist from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences headquartered at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"It is the first time that we show on a local scale that there are significant changes in summer temperatures," said lead author CIRES scientist Irina Mahlstein. "This result shows us that we are experiencing a new summer climate regime in some regions."

Computer memory could increase fivefold from advances in self-assembling polymers

AUSTIN, Texas — The storage capacity of hard disk drives could increase by a factor of five thanks to processes developed by chemists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers' technique, which relies on self-organizing substances known as block copolymers, was described this week in an article in Science. It's also being given a real-world test run in collaboration with HGST, one of the world's leading innovators in disk drives.

Erosion has a point - and an edge

Erosion caused by flowing water does not only smooth out objects, but can also form distinct shapes with sharp points and edges, a team of researchers has found. Their findings, which appear in the latest edition of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveal the unexpected ways that erosion can affect landscapes and artificial materials.

Study offers new tool for incorporating water impacts into policy decisions

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (11/12/2012) —If you've eaten fish, gone for a boat ride or even taken a drink from the tap, you know clean water is a valuable commodity. But just how valuable? That's always been a tough question for policy makers to answer as they weigh the worth of clean water against societal needs that compromise it, such as the need to grow food or produce fossil fuels.

New low carbon TINA reports

The role that new low carbon technologies can play in helping the UK meet its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving towards a green economy have been highlighted today with the publication of three in-depth reports into core areas of innovation.

'Raising the african voice' on climate change

LAGOS, Nigeria – Fifteen science academies of Africa issued a joint statement in Lagos, Nigeria, today calling on the African scientific community to intensify its study of the impact of climate change. Noting that Africa's contribution of scientific information to understanding climate change has been "meagre" to date, the statement calls for African researchers to step up their observation, modeling, and analyses of the effects of climate change on a regional scale, and to help plan interventions to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change on the continent.