Earth

If history is any indication, the erupting volcano from the Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls glacier in Iceland and its immense ash plume could intensify, says a Texas A&M University researcher who has explored Icelandic volcanoes for the past 25 years.

Jay Miller, a research scientist in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program who has made numerous trips to the region and studied there under a Fulbright grant, says the ash produced from Icelandic volcanoes can be a real killer, which is why hundreds of flights from Europe have been cancelled for fear of engine trouble.

The eruption of the Icelandic volcano in the Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls glacier that sent a huge plume of ash into the atmosphere and caused sweeping disruptions of air traffic over Great Britain and Scandinavia today will likely dissipate in the next several days, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder atmospheric scientist.

The Greenland ice sheet has been losing mass at a significant rate during the past several years, contributing to global sea level rise.

Recent studies show dramatic ice loss along the southeastern coast.

Khan et al. combine Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements with measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite to determine that the ice mass loss is accelerating and also spreading into northwestern Greenland.

Evidence that the world's water cycle has already intensified is contained in new research to be published in the American Journal of Climate.

The stronger water cycle means arid regions have become drier and high rainfall regions wetter as atmospheric temperature increases.

This image, acquired today by ESA's Envisat satellite, shows the vast cloud of Eyjafjallajoekull volcanic ash sweeping across the UK from the eruption in Iceland, more than 1000 km away.

Carbon fixation by phytoplankton in the open ocean plays a key role in the global carbon cycle but is not fully understood. Until now researchers believed that cyanobacteria overwhelmingly accounted for phytoplankton's role in carbon fixation in the open ocean. But now scientists at the University of Warwick and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton have opened 'the black box' of eukaryotic phytoplankton and discovered that they actually account for almost half the ocean's carbon fixation by phytoplankton.

A link between low solar activity and jet streams over the Atlantic could explain why, despite global warming trends, people in regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean might need to brace themselves for more frequent cold winters in years to come.

A new report published today, Thursday 15 April, in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters describes how we are moving into an era of lower solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those seen at the end of the seventeenth century.

A sprite is an electrical discharge similar to lightning, but it occurs in the upper atmosphere (50-90 kilometers – 31-56 miles – in altitude), above large thunderstorms. Sprites were first photographed in 1989.

These large flashes of light, which are triggered in almost all cases by positive lightning discharge between the thundercloud and ground, can span tens of kilometers of altitude.

A researcher at North Carolina State University has helped to develop a new method for describing the binding of protons and neutrons within nuclei. This method may improve scientists' ability to predict and understand astrophysical reactions within stars.

When protons and neutrons bind, the process releases energy. This fusion energy is how stars burn. If scientists can determine where these particles are, what they are doing, and how they are binding, they will then be able to more accurately predict and understand the life cycles of stars.

Researchers have devised a new kind of random number generator, for encrypted communications and other uses, that is cryptographically secure, inherently private and – most importantly – certified random by laws of physics.

That is important because randomness is surprisingly rare. Although the welter of events that transpire in the course of daily life can certainly seem haphazard and arbitrary, none of them is genuinely random in the sense that they could not be predicted given sufficient knowledge. Indeed, true randomness is almost impossible to come by.

Global circulation model (GCM) experiments carried out for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) predict that as the Earth undergoes global warming, humidity will increase in subtropical regions.

In just two centuries, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time period that could alter the planet for millions of years, according to a group of prominent scientists that includes a Nobel Laureate. They say the dawning of this new epoch could lead to the sixth largest mass extinction in the Earth's history. Their commentary appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Environmental Science & Technology.

ARGONNE, Ill. (April 13, 2010) — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have pushed the limits of charge breeding and broken a long-standing world record for ionization efficiency of solids.

Argonne's Californium Rare Isotope Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU) project has reached 11.9 percent efficiency with metallic particles of rubidium. The previous metal record was 6.5 percent, using potassium, achieved at Laboratory of Subatomic Physics and Cosmology (LPSC) in Grenoble.

University of Oklahoma researchers are working with Chinese colleagues to better understand intraplate earthquakes—those occurring far from a tectonic plate boundary—in an effort to minimize the loss of life and property in both China and Oklahoma.

China holds the record for the deadliest earthquake with 830,000 casualties, even though the event occurred far from a tectonic plate boundary.

A British scientific expedition has discovered the world's deepest undersea volcanic vents, known as 'black smokers', 3.1 miles (5000 metres) deep in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean. Using a deep-diving vehicle remotely controlled from the Royal Research Ship James Cook, the scientists found slender spires made of copper and iron ores on the seafloor, erupting water hot enough to melt lead, nearly half a mile deeper than anyone has seen before.