Earth

NASA researchers studying urban landscapes have found that the intensity of the "heat island" created by a city depends on the ecosystem it replaced and on the regional climate. Urban areas developed in arid and semi-arid regions show far less heating compared with the surrounding countryside than cities built amid forested and temperate climates.

Researchers studying climate now have a new tool at their disposal: daily global measurements of carbon dioxide and water vapor in a key part of Earth's atmosphere. The data are courtesy of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft and confirm the mainstream scientific view that large changes in the climate are likely over the next century.

San Francisco -- Scientists who study the melting of Greenland's glaciers are discovering that water flowing beneath the ice plays a much more complex role than they previously imagined.

Researchers previously thought that meltwater simply lubricated ice against the bedrock, speeding the flow of glaciers out to sea.

Sprays of dirt flew out of a soil box that held a retaining wall as it violently shook from a simulated 7.4 magnitude earthquake. The wall was put to test recently by engineers at the UC San Diego Englekirk Structural Engineering Center, which has the largest outdoor shake table in the United States. During the first series of tests, led by Dawn Cheng, a UCSD engineering alumna and now a civil engineering professor at UC Davis, researchers investigated the seismic response of a semi-gravity reinforced concrete cantilever wall.

A Web tool that generates color maps of projected temperature and precipitation changes using 16 of the world's most prominent climate-change models is being used to consider such things as habitat shifts that will affect endangered species, places around the world where crops could be at risk because of drought and temperatures that could cripple fruit and nut production in California's Great Central Valley.

New research shows how the migration and settlement patterns associated with the rapid urbanization of Peru may link to Chagas disease transmission. The study, published December 15 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, suggests that the practice of shantytown residents from Arequipa making frequent seasonal moves to rural valleys where Chagas vectors are present may have contributed to the growing presence of Chagas disease near urban Arequipa, Peru.

SEQUIM, Wash. – In a pilot project that could help better manage the planet's strained natural resources, space-age technologies are helping a Washington state community monitor its water availability. NASA satellites and sensors are providing the information needed to make more accurate river flow predictions on a daily basis.

SAN FRANCISCO – For most of a decade, scientists have documented unfelt and slow-moving seismic events, called episodic tremor and slip, showing up in regular cycles under the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They last three weeks on average and release as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake.

Now scientists have discovered more small events, lasting one to 70 hours, which occur in somewhat regular patterns during the 15-month intervals between episodic tremor and slip events.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University scientist has shown man-made changes to the landscape have affected Indian monsoon rains, suggesting that land-use decisions play an important role in climate change.

Monsoon rainfall has decreased over the last 50 years in rural areas where irrigation has been used to increase agriculture in northern India, said Dev Niyogi, an associate professor of agronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences. At the same time, heavily urban areas are seeing an increase in heavy rainfall.

Titan's ice is stronger than most bedrock found on earth, yet it is more brittle, causing it to erode more easily, according to new research by San Francisco State University Assistant Professor Leonard Sklar. Today, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, Sklar and his team presented new measurements from tests on ice as cold as minus 170 degrees Celcius which demonstrate that ice gets stronger as temperature decreases. Understanding ice and its resistance to erosion is critical to answering how Titan's earth-like landscape formed.

The first paper on proton collisions in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - designed to provide the highest energy ever explored with particle accelerators - is published online this week in Springer's European Physical Journal C.

"Development cooperation can play an important role in ensuring that the poorest countries will benefit from climate change funding," says Olof Drakenberg, policy analyst at the Environmental Economics Unit at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study of Pacific Ocean sediments off the coast of Chile has found that offshore waters experienced systematic oxygen depletion during the rapid warming of the Antarctic following the last "glacial maximum" period 20,000 years ago.

The findings are intriguing as scientists are exploring whether climate change may be contributing to outbreaks of hypoxia – or extremely low oxygen levels – along the near-shore regions of South America and the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

The northern coastline of Alaska midway between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay is eroding by up to one-third the length of a football field annually because of a "triple whammy" of declining sea ice, warming seawater and increased wave activity, according to new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

University of Alberta researchers are part of an international team that has used DNA samples from frozen dirt, not fossilized bones, to revise the history of North America's woolly mammoths and ancient horses.

The work of U of A Earth and Atmospheric Sciences professor Duane Froese and his colleagues counters an important extinction theory, based on radiocarbon dating of bones and teeth. That analysis concluded that more than half of the large mammals in North America (the 'megafauna') disappeared about 13,000 years ago.