Earth Sciences

A team of Australian astronomers have developed a way of forecasting the weather on Mars – without putting their toes in space and created beautiful images of our neighbouring planet.

Their discoveries will help us determine if Mars was a kinder place for life in the past. And by forecasting the Martian weather they hope to be able to reduce the risks to spacecraft, such as the recent failed Beagle mission and possible future manned missions to Mars.

Sarah Chamberlain of the

Quake researchers ’look’ deep inside fault with cold war-era gravity sensor

Using classified technology developed by the military during the Cold War, a team of geoscientists led by Rice University’s Manik Talwani is conducting a first-of-its-kind experiment on California’s famed San Andreas fault this week. The researchers will gather data that could give scientists a much clearer picture of the fault’s “gouge zone,” a region 2-3 kilometers beneath the eart

Caring for more than 180,000 Sudanese refugees gathered in the desert landscape of eastern Chad, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has begun using satellite data to identify hidden water resources and site new camps.

By permission of the Chadian government, there are currently nine United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) camps in place. UNHCR has transferred the vast majority of the refugees from the volatile border to the camps. Thousands more have co

Scientists conclude that, 65 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid or comet slammed into what is now the Yucatán peninsula, excavating the Chicxulub impact crater and setting into motion a chain of catastrophic events thought to precipitate the extinction of the dinosaurs and 75 percent of animal and plant life that existed in the late Cretaceous period.

“The impact of an asteroid or comet several kilometers across heaps environmental insult after insult on the world,” said

The smudges of dark blue on this Envisat-derived ozone forecast trace the start of what has unfortunately become an annual event: the opening of the ozone hole above the South Pole.

“Ever since this phenomenon was first discovered in the mid-1980s, satellites have served as an important means of monitoring it,” explained José Achache, ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes. “ESA satellites have been routinely observing stratospheric ozone concentrations for the last decade. “

About 25 miles beneath the Earth’s surface is a discrete boundary between the planet’s rocky crust and the mantle below that geologists call the Moho. But in the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, the Moho just isn’t there, reports a team of geologists.

“The Moho is missing,” said team leader George Zandt, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It’s the first report of such a disappearance in California.Zandt said the