Earth Sciences

Long-debated, a firm answer is now on the horizon

Earth’s magnetic field reverses every few thousand years at low latitudes and every 10,000 years at high latitudes, a geologist funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has concluded. Brad Clement of Florida International University published his findings in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. The results are a major step forward in scientists’ understanding of how Earth’s magnetic field works.

Next time an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth you can go to a web site to find out if you have time to finish lunch or need to jump in the car and DRIVE.

University of Arizona scientists are launching an easy-to-use, web-based program that tells you how the collision will affect your spot on the globe by calculating several environmental consequences of its impact.

Starting today, the program is online at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects

It’s bad enough that fossils, buried deep in layers of rock for thousands or millions of years, may be damaged or missing pieces, but what really challenges paleontologists, according to University at Buffalo researchers, is the amount of deformation that most fossils exhibit.

That’s why Tammy Dunlavey, a master’s degree candidate in the Department of Geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, and her colleagues are working on a computational method to morph fossils back

Using a unique combination of ground-based and space-based tools, scientists have determined for the first time how drought conditions, and possibly carbon uptake, in the Amazon rainforest can be quantified over large forest areas from space. The results are published in the on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 5-9.

“Understanding the Amazon environment is an essential puzzle piece needed to understand how the biosphere interacts with the clima

How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week’s issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the struc

A team of geologists can tell you more about earthquakes in “Middle Earth” than can the whole trilogy of “The Lord of the Rings.”

Specifically, how do earthquakes happen in Earth’s tightly squeezed middle layers where pressure is far too great to allow any shifting of the rock? According to a paper published in the April 1 issue of the journal Nature, breakdown of the mineral serpentine provides enough wiggle room to trigger an earthquake. The report suggests a new mechanism to explain