Earth Sciences

The plan to win full United Nations backing for an International Year of Planet Earth has come a step closer as the proposal wins the backing of the Executive Board of UNESCO, the United Nations Scientific, Cultural and Educational Organization in Paris [Note 1].

The Project, already supported by the geoscience communities in most IUGS countries was introduced to the Agenda by the Permanent Delegation of the United Republic of Tanzania, led by the ambassador to UNESCO, Prof. Mo

Two Dartmouth researchers have weighed in on the debate over whether the presence of methane gas on Mars indicates life on the red planet. Mukul Sharma, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences, and Chris Oze, a postdoctoral fellow, argue that the Martian methane could have been produced by inorganic processes just as easily as by bacteria.

In their paper published online in May in the American Geophysical Union’s journal, Geophysical Research Letters, Sharma and Oze describe

Scientists are continually exploring different aspects of hurricanes to increase the understanding of how they behave. Recently, NASA-funded scientists from Florida State University looked at ozone around hurricanes and found that ozone levels drop as a hurricane is intensifying.

In a recent study, Xiaolei Zou and Yonghui Wu, researchers at Florida State University found that variations of ozone levels from the surface to the upper atmosphere are closely related to the formation,

A submarine seismic sensor was recently set in place at 2400 m depth, off Toulon. The instrument was attached to a neutrino telescope developed by the international scientific programme Antares (1) . For the first time in Europe, this sensor, designed by a partnership between Géosciences Azur (Mixed Research Unit IRD/CNRS/UPMC/UNSA, Villefranche sur Mer)(2) and Guralp System (United Kingdom), with the financial support of INSU, Villefranche Oceanological Observatory and the Provence-Alpes-Côte d

Fairbanks, Alaska-Continued arctic warming may be causing a decrease in the number and size of Arctic lakes. The issue is the subject of a paper published in the June 3 issue of the journal “Science.” The paper, titled, “Disappearing Arctic Lakes” is the result of a comparison of satellite data taken of Siberia in the early 1970s to data from 1997-2004. Researchers, including Larry Hinzman with the Water and Environmental Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, tracked changes of

Human activities are causing ocean temperatures to rise, according to a paper published in the American journal Science on 3 June, 2005.

Tim Barnett, the lead author on the paper said: ‘The evidence, based on computer models and observations in the field, is so strong that it should put an end to any debate about whether humanity is causing global warming.’

In the paper the scientists describe how they have been able to rule out natural climate variability and solar or