Earth Sciences

Scientists have discovered why there isn’t much impact-melted rock at Meteor Crater in northern Arizona. The iron meteorite that blasted out Meteor Crater almost 50,000 years ago was traveling much slower than has been assumed, University of Arizona Regents’ Professor H. Jay Melosh and Gareth Collins of the Imperial College London report in the cover article of Nature (March 10).

“Meteor Crater was the first terrestrial crater identified as a meteorite impact scar, and it’s proba

Earth’s ice-covered polar regions help to keep our climate cool and hold tremendous amounts of fresh water locked up in their glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets. The ice contained in these vast freshwater reservoirs is the equivalent of nearly 220 feet of sea level. However, when most people think of polar ice, they usually do not think of Canada, the location of only a small percentage of the Arctic’s polar land ice.

Recent research conducted by NASA scientists has reve

New NSF plane will go higher and farther on environment studies

A new aircraft with exceptional research capabilities is scheduled to arrive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colo., this Friday. Known as HIAPER (High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research), the $81.5 million aircraft will serve the environmental research needs of the National Science Foundation, (NSF), NCAR’s primary sponsor and owner of the aircraft, for t

The occurrence of a super-eruption would have severe environmental effects and might threaten global civilisation. This is the assessment of a Geological Society of London working group [Notes 1,2] composed of senior Earth Scientists. The effects of a super-eruption would be comparable to those predicted for the impact of a 1km-diameter asteroid with the Earth. In fact, super-eruptions are 5-10 times more likely to occur than such an impact. The assessment of the working party has been presen

GRUMP mapping project finds urban areas increasing in surprising ways

The majority of the world’s population will soon live in urban rather than rural areas. Adding a spatial dimension to population estimates, a new study finds that as much as three percent of the Earth’s land area has already been urbanized, which is double previous estimates.

This new data collection, known as the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project, or GRUMP, has provided the basis for a number of im

The telltale paw prints with huge 10 centimetre-long nails spoke volumes. But now definitive corroborating DNA evidence seals the case of the most northerly sighting of a grizzly bear. The discovery fuels mounting evidence that Canada’s High Arctic is no longer the sole preserve of the polar bear – Nanuk is having to make room for its southern cousin.

The evidence of the barren ground grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) was discovered on Melville Island, an uninhabited part of the western