Earth Sciences

A unique monitoring system in place on the island of Montserrat can record the everyday changes beneath the Soufriere Hills volcano and throughout the island, according to an international team of volcanologists.

The CALIPSO project (Caribbean Andesite Lava Island Precision Seismo-geodetic Observatory) is the first volcano monitoring system of its type installed at an andesitic volcano. Andesite volcanoes are the most important volcano type making up the Earth’s Ring of Fire, and h

Earthquakes are not unusual in the San Francisco Bay Area, but a team of Penn State geoscientists believes that the hazard may be greater than previously thought because of a hidden fault under Marin County.

“We think we have evidence that there is an additional earthquake hazard in the San Francisco area due to a blind thrust fault,” says Dr. Kevin P. Furlong, professor of geosciences. “Blind thrust faults are notorious because they are hard to find until an earthquake occurs on t

A vision for the future of Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) is revealed today by the Director designate, Professor Edward Hill.

Professor Hill’s vision is for the Centre to be recognised internationally as the focus for oceanography in the UK. It will be renamed the ‘National Oceanography Centre, Southampton’ from 1 May 2005, when Professor Hill takes up his appointment, heralding the start of a new era for oceanographic and earth science research and education in this country

It won’t quite be a white Christmas for Professor Nick Petford, but the Kingston University geologist will see in the New Year in sub-zero temperatures. Professor Petford, from the Centre for Earth and Environmental Science Research, flies out to Antarctica on December 27 to investigate the ancient interiors of volcanoes. He has been selected as one of only 25 participants from around the world to take part in a month-long expedition to the remote McMurdo Dry Valleys region.

Although vo

This ultra high-resolution sea surface temperature map of the Mediterranean could only have been made with satellites. Any equivalent ground-based map would need almost a million and a half thermometers placed into the water simultaneously, one for every two square kilometres of sea.

This most detailed ever heat map of all 2 965 500 square kilometres of the Mediterranean, the world’s largest inland sea is being updated on a daily basis as part of ESA’s Medspiration proje

Team discovers large, new class of airborne particles unaccounted for in climate models

Dry dust reacts with air pollutants to form dewy particles whose sunlight-reflecting and cloud-altering properties are unaccounted for in atmospheric models. “Calcite-containing dust particles blow into the air and encounter gaseous nitric acid in polluted air from factories to form an entirely new particle of calcium nitrate,” said Alexander Laskin, a senior research scientist at the Departme