Earth Sciences

As the first snowfalls mark the opening of the new skiing season in Europe, glaciologists at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UWA) are warning that time may be running out for ski resorts built on glaciers.

Dr Bryn Hubbard of the Centre for Glaciology at UWA is studying the response of some of the world’s most sensitive ice masses to climate change. As part of the work his team is set to study the decay of the Tsanfleuron glacier in Switzerland, home to one of the country’s premier summ

Continual release of gas from rising magma defuses explosive eruption

Two University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists have proposed an explanation for the unpredictable nature of volcanic eruptions, why volcanoes sometimes ooze lava, but at other times explode in showers of ash and pumice.

“One of the central problems of volcanoes is: Why do they erupt and why do they alternate between relatively benign effusive eruptions and destructive explosive eruptions?” said Mich

The greenhouse gas, methane, has stopped growing in the global background atmosphere and could begin to decrease, CSIRO researchers announced today.

“Methane is the second most important gas after carbon dioxide. It is responsible for a fifth of the enhanced greenhouse effect over the past 200 years,” says Dr Paul Fraser, a chief research scientist at CSIRO Atmospheric Research.

“Over the past four years there has been no growth in atmospheric methane concentrations compared to a

Despite tremendous technological advances in earthquake seismology, many fundamental mysteries remain. The critical question of whether earthquakes will ever be predictable continues to plague seismologists – in part because there is no way to directly observe what goes on miles below the surface where earthquakes occur.

All of that is about to change, however, as a team of scientists led by Stanford University and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) finally begins construction of the long-a

Dotted across varied regions of our planet are the waterlogged landscapes known as wetlands. Often inaccessible, these muddy areas are actually treasure houses of ecological diversity – their overall value measured in trillions of Euros.

For much of the last century wetlands have been drained or otherwise degraded, but scientific understanding of their important roles in terms of biology and the water cycle has grown, spurring international efforts to preserve them. On 20 November ESA forma

Enormous quantities of sediment are deposited in the flood-plains traversed by the Amazon and its tributaries in times of flooding. Scientists have hitherto considered the sedimentation rate to be generally constant with time.

Research conducted jointly by the IRD, the Universities of Washington1 and California2 and the Bolivian National Meteorology and Hydrology Service (SENAMHI) of La Paz, on two Bolivian rivers shows on the contrary that such events are irregular and less frequent than h