Earth Sciences

People say size doesn’t matter, and that may be true for tiny plankton, those free-floating ocean plants that make up the bottom of the marine food-chain. Little plankton may be able to change the weather, and longer term climate, in ways that serve them better.

It’s almost hard to believe, but new NASA-funded research confirms an old theory that plankton can indirectly create clouds that block some of the Sun’s harmful rays. The study was conducted by Dierdre Toole of the Woods Hole Oce

A team of researchers led by the University of Sheffield and supported by English Heritage have found eighty 13,000-year-old carvings in limestone rock of Church Hole Cave, at Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire. The carvings are a unique find and form the most elaborate cave art ceiling in the world.

The carvings, which appear on the ceiling of the cave, represent animal figures, including deer, bears, birds and possibly dancing women.

Dr Paul Pettitt, of the Department of Archaeolog

If raindrops on roses are among your favorite things, University of Washington researchers have encountered some monster drops that could change your mind.

On two occasions, separated by four years and thousands of miles and in very different conditions, raindrops were measured at sizes similar to or greater than the largest ever recorded. The largest ones were at least 8 millimeters in diameter, about the same as the largest previously observed, and were possibly a centimeter – about four

This morning a team of forty scientists from seven UK universities will travel to the Azores to join hundreds more in the largest international atmospheric field campaign of its type ever attempted.

The exciting mission will track and investigate a mass of polluted air as it leaves the United States and travels across the Atlantic to the UK and mainland Europe. Scientists will measure chemical reactions within the air-mass as it travels, quantifying the resulting pollutants delivered to Eu

Deep in the Antarctic interior, buried under thousands of meters [more than two miles] of ice, lies Lake Vostok, the world’s largest subglacial lake. Scientists believe that the waters of Lake Vostok have not been disturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, and there are tantalizing clues that microbes may exist there that have been isolated for at least as long.

Now, the most comprehensive measurements of the lake–roughly the size of Lake Ontario in North America–indicate that it is

A powerful new instrument heading to space this Saturday is expected to send back long-sought answers about greenhouse gases, atmospheric cleansers and pollutants, and the destruction and recovery of the ozone layer. Only a cubic yard in size but laden with technical wizardry, the High-Resolution Dynamic Limb Sounder (HIRDLS) will measure a slew of atmospheric chemicals at a horizontal and vertical precision unprecedented in a multi-year space instrument.

Scientists at the National Center f