Earth

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 7, 2013 – A University of Utah seismologist analyzed seismic waves that bombarded Earth's core, and believes he got a look at the earliest roots of Earth's most cataclysmic kind of volcanic eruption. But don't worry. He says it won't happen for perhaps 200 million years.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The peaks of the Himalayas are a modern remnant of massive tectonic forces that fused India with Asia tens of millions of years ago. Previous estimates have suggested this collision occurred about 50 million years ago, as India, moving northward at a rapid pace, crushed up against Eurasia. The crumple zone between the two plates gave rise to the Himalayas, which today bear geologic traces of both India and Asia. Geologists have sought to characterize the rocks of the Himalayas in order to retrace one of the planet's most dramatic tectonic collisions.

With help from a wind tunnel and the latest DNA technology, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are shedding light on the travel patterns of microbes in soils carried off by strong winds. The work has implications for soil health and could lead to management practices that minimize the damage to soils caused by wind erosion.

The next advance in weather forecasting may not come from a new satellite or supercomputer, but from a device in your pocket. University of Washington atmospheric scientists are using pressure sensors included in the newest smartphones to develop better weather forecasting techniques.

"With this approach we could potentially have tens or hundreds of thousands of additional surface pressure observations, which could significantly improve short-term weather forecasts," said Cliff Mass, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.

Tropical rainforests are often called the "lungs of the planet" because they generally draw in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. But the amount of carbon dioxide that rainforests absorb, or produce, varies hugely with year-to-year variations in the climate. In a paper published online this week (Feb 6 2013) by the journal Nature, a team of climate scientists from the University of Exeter, the Met Office-Hadley Centre and the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, has shown that these variations reveal how vulnerable the rainforest is to climate change.

"You don't know what you've got 'til it's collapsed." That's how University of Guelph integrative biologists might recast a line from an iconic folk tune for their new research paper warning about the perils of ecosystem breakdown.

Their research, published today as the cover story in Nature, suggests farmers and resource managers should not rely on seemingly stable but vulnerable single-crop monocultures. Instead they should encourage more kinds of plants in fields and woods as a buffer against sudden ecosystem disturbance.

February 6, 2013 (Ottawa, ON) - Cities are major players in the climate change game. More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas and over 70% of global GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions can be attributed to cities. A case study of Toronto demonstrates alternative strategies for how the city can implement a low carbon urban infrastructure plan by 2031. Two scenarios are described: one based on Toronto's current policies was found to reduce GHG emissions by 31%; and another suggests aggressive alternatives that could reduce GHG emissions by 71%.

The location of an underwater volcanic vent, marked by a low-lying plume of shimmering water, has been revealed by scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Writing in the journal PLOS ONE the researchers describe how the vent, discovered in a remote region of the Southern Ocean, differs from what we have come to recognise as "classic" hydrothermal vents. Using SHRIMP, the National Oceanography Centre's high resolution deep-towed camera platform, scientists imaged the seafloor at Hook Ridge, more than 1,000 metres deep.

Source:

Source:

NASA-NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite captured a night-time image of extra-tropical cyclone Felleng as it was being battered by wind shear in the Southern Indian Ocean.

Holocene subaqueous paleoseismology of Lake TahoeShane B. Smith et al., Dept. of Geological Sciences, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557-0172, USA. Posted online 11 Jan. 2013; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/B30629.1.

Ever since Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger put his unfortunate cat in a box, his fellow physicists have been using something called quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles.

But a new paper by physics professor Andreas Albrecht and graduate student Dan Phillips at the University of California, Davis, makes the case that these quantum fluctuations actually are responsible for the probability of all actions, with far-reaching implications for theories of the universe.

For the first time, scientists have created single layers of a naturally occurring rare mineral called tungstenite, or WS2. The resulting sheet of stacked sulfur and tungsten atoms forms a honeycomb pattern of triangles that have been shown to have unusual light-emitting, or photoluminescent, properties.

Alexandria, VA –Scientists are revisiting the age-old question of how Earth's moon formed with the development of two new models that work out the complicated physics of planetary collisions.

The idea of a moon-forming collision is not new: The Giant Impact Theory put forth in the 1970s suggested that the moon resulted from a collision with a protoplanet approximately half the size of ancient Earth. But the physics underlying such a collision implied that the moon should be made up of debris mostly from the protoplanet.