Earth Sciences

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., is unveiling a powerful new version of a supercomputer-based system to model Earth’s climate and to project global temperature rise in coming decades. Scientists will contribute results to the next assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international research body that advises policymakers on the likely impacts of climate change. The system, known as the Community Climate System Model, version

New findings suggest that surface geometry determines volcanic activity

What causes the peaks and valleys of the world’s great mountains? For continental ranges like the Appalachians or the Northwest’s Cascades, the geological picture is clearer. Continents crash or volcanoes erupt, then glaciers erode away. Yet scientists are still puzzling out what makes the highs high and the lows low for the planet’s largest mountain chain, the 55,000-mile-long Mid-Ocean Ridge.

This we

When the Nisqually earthquake struck western Washington in 2001, brick chimneys in parts of West Seattle and Bremerton were left looking like so much straw after the Big Bad Wolf had gone huffing and puffing through. Hundreds of brick chimneys at the north end of West Seattle and north of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton were seriously damaged or toppled by the magnitude 6.7 temblor.

New research suggests the main culprit might have been the Seattle fault, even though the earthquake

There are elaborate hieroglyphs, burial objects and other clues.

But the recent application of a geological technique to an archaeological problem may offer a unique tool for gleaning seemingly unknowable facts about the ancient Maya – based only on excavated bones and teeth.

University of Florida geology Professor David Hodell and Associate Professor Mark Brenner did an elaborate review of the technique, which combines elements of geology, anthropology and forensic science,

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has been selected by NASA to build two of the three instruments for a satellite that will launch in 2006 to study noctilucent clouds, the shiny, silvery-blue polar mesospheric clouds that form about 50 miles over Earth’s polar regions each summer.

The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere mission, or AIM, will receive $100 million in NASA funding for development and flight of the satellite. CU’s LASP will recei

On 2 May 2004, the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the ESA Mars Express spacecraft obtained images from the central area of the Mars canyon called Valles Marineris.

The images were taken at a resolution of approximately 16 metres per pixel. The displayed region is located at the southern rim of the Melas Chasma at Mars latitude 12°S and Mars longitude 285°E. The images were taken on orbit 360 of Mars Express.

This region shows several clues to the morphological and