Earth Sciences

A giant ice shelf the size of Scotland is melting rapidly in warm Antarctic waters, a report in SCIENCE will reveal today. Thinning of the Larsen Ice Shelf – vast sections of which collapsed catastrophically during the 1990’s – was discovered by scientists at the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Bristol and the Instituto Antártico Argentino. The findings suggest that Antarctica may be more sensitive to the effects of global warming than was previously considered.

Evidence has mounted for nearly 20 years that a great earthquake ripped the seafloor off the Washington coast in 1700, long before there were any written records in the region. Now, a newly authenticated record of a fatal shipwreck in Japan has added an intriguing clue.

Written records collected from villages along a 500-mile stretch of the main Japanese island of Honshu show the coast was hit by a series of waves, collectively called a tsunami, on Jan. 28, 1700. Because no Japanese earthqu

For at least a million years, owls throughout the West have been snapping up sagebrush voles and reducing them to gray pellets of fur, bones and teeth littering the foot of the roost.

Thanks to pack rats, however, these voles have not been forgotten.

In one Colorado cave, a pack rat collection of teeth and bones has yielded a layered slice of vole history between 600,000 and a million years ago, providing an unprecedented picture of how a species changes and evolves, and how its e

A trio of scientists including a researcher from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found that humans may owe the relatively mild climate in which their ancestors evolved to tiny marine organisms with shells and skeletons made out of calcium carbonate.

In a paper titled “Carbonate Deposition, Climate Stability and Neoproterozoic Ice Ages” in the Oct. 31 edition of Science, UC Riverside researchers Andy Ridgwell and Martin Kennedy along with LLNL climate scientist Ken Caldeira, di

New evidence of global warming in Earth’s past supports current models for how climate responds to greenhouse gases

CA–Scientists have filled in a key piece of the global climate picture for a period 55 million years ago that is considered one of the most abrupt and extreme episodes of global warming in Earth’s history. The new results from an analysis of sediment cores from the ocean floor are consistent with theoretical predictions of how Earth’s climate would respon

The presence of a common green mineral on Mars suggests that the red planet could have been cold and dry since the mineral has been exposed, which may be more than a billion years according to new research appearing in the Oct. 24 edition of Science.
Todd Hoefen, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) geophysicist, led a team of researchers from USGS, Arizona State University and NASA, that found abundant quantities of olivine on Mars. They based their conclusions on data obtained from a Thermal Emiss