Earth Sciences

Using data from NASA’s Aqua satellite, agency scientists found heavy smoke from burning vegetation inhibits cloud formation. The research suggests the cooling of global climate by pollutant particles, called “aerosols,” may be smaller than previously estimated.

During the August-October 2002 burning season in South America’s Amazon River basin, scientists observed cloud cover decreased from about 40 percent in clean-air conditions to zero in smoky air.

Until recently, sci

Early life may have lived very differently than life today

As two rovers scour Mars for signs of water and the precursors of life, geochemists have uncovered evidence that Earth’s ancient oceans were much different from today’s. The research, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, cites new data that shows that Earth’s life-giving oceans contained less oxygen than today’s and could have been nearly devoid of oxygen for a billion years longer than previously thought. T

Fossilised remains of sea creatures are commonly found in rocks in the mountains of the Basque Country. So, at some time in the past, Euskal Herria was under the sea. For example, during the Palaeocene period, some 65-55 million years ago. The region was then subtropical, and similar in appearance to the Australian Coral Reef.

Along the Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa coast, around Eibar, in Irati and in Urbasa, for example, we can see Palaeocene outcrops at the surface. During that period there were

Surprisingly, the probability that an earthquake should reoccur in any part of the world is smaller, the longer the time since the last quake took place. This is one of the conclusions reached by the physicist Álvaro Corral, researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Corral has been the first to observe that there is a relation between consecutive quake-to-quake time intervals that follows a universal distribution of probability. This in turn suggests the existence of a simple physica

Locked in Arctic Soils Into the Ocean, Researchers Say The Arctic Ocean receives about ten percent of Earth’s river water and with it some 25 teragrams [28 million tons] per year of dissolved organic carbon that had been held in far northern bogs and other soils. Scientists had not known the age of the carbon that reaches the ocean: was it recently derived from contemporary plant material, or had it been locked in soils for hundreds or thousands of years and therefore not part of

Period was previously thought to be ice-free

Arlington, Va.-Scientists using cores drilled from the New Jersey coastal plain have found that ice sheets likely caused massive sea level change during the Late Cretaceous Period -an interval previously thought to be ice-free. The scientists, who will publish their results in the March-April issue of the Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin, assert that either ice sheets grew and decayed in that greenhouse world or our understandin