Earth Sciences

The discovery that an ocean ridge under the Arctic ice cap is unexpectedly volcanically active and contains multiple hydrothermal vents may cause scientists to modify a decades-long understanding of how ocean ridges work to produce the Earth’s crust.

The new results, which come from a study of the Gakkel Ridge, one of the slowest spreading ridges on Earth, have broad implications for the understanding of the globe-encircling mid-ocean ridge system where melting of the underlying mantle

The first direct evidence of fullerenes in material originating from outer space could reinforce the meteorite impact theory of mass extinction on Earth and the existence of fullerenes in interstellar dust. The existence, or not, of the closed-cage carbon molecules known as fullerenes in outer space has been an area of controversy. A team from Reading University in the UK is publishing its findings in Proceedings A, a Royal Society scientific journal.

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When internal waves up to 300 feet first form they cause a mighty churning of ocean waters – something invisible to and unfelt by anyone at the surface.

Now in a novel use of mooring data, some of it three decades old, a University of Washington researcher has calculated just how much punch these waves appear to carry as they travel, or propagate, thousands of miles from where they originate.

It’s energy that appears to be crucial to the conveyor-belt-like circulation wherein m

The arrival of summer brings increased chances of thunderstorms and dangerous lightning. NASA marks National Lightning Safety Awareness Week, June 22-29, by highlighting the unique contributions agency lightning research makes to climate studies, severe storm detection and prediction.

Lightning is dangerous, so improving our understanding of it and its role in weather and climate is important. NASA researchers at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., created

Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley along with researchers from Ethiopia and several other countries have uncovered fossils of the earliest modern human, Homo sapiens, estimated at 154,000 to 160,000 years old. According to the scientists, the findings provide strong evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals co-existed, rather than the former descending from the latter.

In two articles appearing in the June 12 edition of the journal Nature, the authors describe the fo

The amount of gaseous mercury in the atmosphere has dropped sharply from its peak in the 1980s and has remained relatively constant since the mid 1990s. This welcome decline may result from control measures undertaken in western Europe and North America, but scientists who have just concluded a study of atmospheric mercury say they cannot reconcile the amounts actually found with current understanding of natural and manmade sources of the element. An international group of scientists, led by