Earth Sciences

Scientists find undersea mountains, discover new species, and spy on fish

Scientists can now visualize the ocean floor in remote areas of the Arctic, observe rockfish hideouts, and see live images of coral cities thousands of meters under the sea’s surface. Soon their robots will be able to “live” on the bottom of the ocean – monitoring everything from signs of tsunamis to the effects of deep sea drilling. “We have very complex problems in the ocean, but we’ve been looking at

A Canadian seismologist is arguing that our understanding of the structure of the Earth’s interior is based on the equivalent of fuzzy ultrasound images that leave room for improvement.

Once seismic images are fine-tuned to remove background noise, they may tell a very different story of the world below, says Dr. Felix Herrmann, a seismologist at the University of British Columbia. And oil companies are already lining up to cash in on his clearer view of the Earth’s un

Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist.

“The recent dating of the Siberian trap volcanoes to be contemporaneous with the end-Permian extinction suggests that they were the trigger for the environmental events that caused the extinctions,” says Dr. Lee R.

Around 60 nations and more than 40 international organisations joined ESA and host the European Community at the Third Earth Observation summit on Wednesday. History was made at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels as assembled delegates formally agreed a ten-year plan to implement a Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

The plan summarises the steps that need to be taken to put a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) in place. GEOSS will build on existing Earth

Although most people think of California when they think of earthquakes, the Feb. 10 quake in Arkansas was not unusual, said UAB geologist Scott Brande, Ph.D. “There are fault zones throughout the Eastern United States, and many are associated with the Appalachian Mountains.

The one causing the earthquake in Arkansas was the New Madrid seismic zone, which has a long history of earthquake activity. Hundreds of earthquakes occur there each year along the borders of Missouri, Kentucky, T

Several large earthquakes with magnitude higher than 8 on the Richter scale have already occurred along the margins between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, under the ocean off Ecuador and Colombia. This region is vulnerable, all the more so because since the 1980s, Ecuador’s oil export terminal is sited within it. More information is needed on this zone of extremely high seismic risk. For this reason, two scientific campaigns, “Amadeus” and “Esmeraldas” were launched on 3 Februa