Earth Sciences

Fossilized bones found in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, are likely those of the earliest known South American penguin, which probably lived 20 million years earlier than scientists had supposed. The new find doubles the known fossil record of penguins in South America.

That’s the conclusion of Dr. Julia A. Clarke, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, and her colleagues from Argentina, who published their findings in the December 200

ESA’s new Weather Today website allows you to access data from space relied upon by weather forecasters across Europe.

Perched in geostationary orbit 36,000 km above Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, the seventh ESA-developed Meteosat satellite maintains a constant weather eye on the European continent and its neighbours. Day and night every 30 minutes it routinely acquires a new image combining visual, infrared and water vapour channels.

Meteosat operator Eumetsat – the intergove

British scientists set sail today from Glasgow to begin work aimed at discovering if Britain is indeed in danger of entering the next ice age.

Scientists on the Royal Research Ship Discovery are on their way to deploy oceanographic instruments across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas. The instruments will spend the next four years measuring the temperature, salinity and speed of currents.

The work is part of a research programme called Rapid Climate Change, f

As the tropical oceans continue to heat up, following a 20-year trend, warm rains in the tropics are likely to become more frequent, according to NASA scientists.

In a study by William Lau and Huey-Tzu Jenny Wu, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., the authors offer early proof of a long-held theory that patterns of evaporation and precipitation, known as the water cycle, may accelerate in some areas due to warming temperatures. The research appears in the current iss

Excavation of what is believed to be remains of the first-dated mammoth discovered on the Texas Gulf Coast is in its initial phases but living up to the expectations of its researchers, a team of students and archaeologists from Texas A&M University’s Center for the Study of the First Americans.

The mammoth was found buried in a sand pit just outside Lake Jackson, Texas in the town of Clute by a backhoe operator for Vernor Material & Equipment Co. who uncovered a pair of tusks. Further

500 or more dinosaurs possible yet to be discovered

A graduate student in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has combed the dinosaur fossil record from T. Rex to songbirds and has compiled the first quantitative analysis of the quality and congruence of that record.

Julia Heathcote, whose advisor is Josh Smith, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences, examined data of more than 250 di