Earth Sciences

Engineers who were studying beach erosion got more than they bargained for recently when they discovered unexpected wave behavior in the water along an east coast shoreline.

The finding could ultimately cause researchers to re-examine ideas about beach erosion and the repair of beaches that are damaged by tropical storms. “It could just be that the physics of the system is a little different than we thought,” said Thomas Lippmann, a research scientist in the Department of Civil and

Ice dams across the deepest gorge on Earth created some of the highest-elevation lakes in history. New research shows the most recent of these lakes, in the Himalaya Mountains of Tibet, broke through its ice barrier somewhere between 600 and 900 AD, causing massive torrents of water to pour through the Himalayas into India.

Geological evidence points to the existence of at least three lakes, and probably four, at various times in history when glacial ice from the Himalayas blocked

Following are summaries of a few of the papers being presented at the AGU meeting by scientists affiliated with the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Global Poverty

Mapping Poverty: The Geographical And Biophysical Correlates Of Hunger And Infant Mortality

It is difficult to design programs to reduce poverty unless you understand where and why that poverty occurs. De Sherbinin and colleagues present recent efforts to integrate global spatial dat

A team of University of Minnesota scientists has discovered how iron- and chromium-rich rocks can generate natural gas (methane) and related hydrocarbons when reacted with superheated fluids circulating deep beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Because the process is completely nonbiological, the hydrocarbons could have been a source of “food” for some of the first organisms to inhabit the Earth. Also, methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and this process may have contributed t

Engineers constructing a new railroad across the vast, high-altitude Tibetan Plateau are using a surprisingly simple idea to fortify shifting frozen soils affected by climate warming, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder permafrost expert.

“The Qinghai-Xizang railroad is the most ambitious construction project in a permafrost region since the Trans-Alaska Pipeline,” said CU-Boulder and National Snow and Ice Data Center researcher Tingjun Zhang. Zhang is working closely

Issue 43 of RTD info delves into the latest advances in European seismology as scientists grapple to crack the hidden secrets of earthquakes in their bid to minimise the devastating impact of this deadly phenomenon.

“The furies of the Earth can be awesome,” begins a special 11-page report on earthquakes in the latest issue of RTD info. “What can science do in the face of such cataclysms unleashed from the very depths of the Earth? The first step is to know and understand the phenomen