Earth Sciences

The Brazilian World Cup celebrations may have started to die down, but in space the never-ending football match between the Sun and Earth continues. And watching this match closely are Salsa, Samba, Rumba and Tango, the four satellites that make up the Cluster mission. They are performing their Brazilian dances 119 000 kilometres above our heads. With all the grace and skill of the Brazilian players on the football field, the spacecraft making up the Cluster quartet are currently chan

Scientist continues to build case for origin of plate tectonics

A Saint Louis University geologist has unearthed further evidence in his mounting case that shifting of the continents — and perhaps life on Earth — began much earlier than many scientists believe.

Tim Kusky, a professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences, has discovered the world’s first large intact pieces of oceanic mantle from the planet’s earliest period, the Archean. The nearly mile-long section of rock,

Blinding dust storms can seriously ruin your plans for a landing on Mars. ESA is adapting the global climate models that we use to forecast our weather on Earth for the turbulent conditions that Mars offers its future visitors.

You could hardly call the weather on Mars pleasant, and presently it is far from predictable. As well as having an average surface temperature of -63°C, and a thin, inhospitable atmosphere of mainly carbon dioxide, last year, a springtime dust storm smothered the enti

UC Berkeley scientist urges drilling into frozen lake under ice near South Pole as prelude to drilling into subglacial lakes in Antarctica and into Mars polar caps

Measurements of the ice temperature far below the South Pole suggest that a so-called “lake” discovered at the base of the ice is most likely permafrost – a frozen mixture of dirt and ice – because the temperature is too low for liquid water.
Far from being a disappointment, says a University of California, Berkeley p

Capping two years of research, a nationwide group of over 100 scientists has created a powerful new computer model of the Earth’s climate. The model surpasses previous efforts by successfully incorporating the impact of such variables as ocean currents and changes in land-surface temperatures.

Researchers will use the model, called CCSM-2 (Community Climate System Model, version 2) to probe how our climate works and to experiment with “what-if” scenarios to predict what our climate may be l

There is high temperature inside our planet and the reason is not known yet. A common belief that the Earth`s interior is heated by radioactive elements is now doubted of. Professor Felix Letnikov from Irkutsk Institute of the Earth`s Crust have proposed an idea that the heat is formed in the outer core because of friction between its layers.

Different geophysical data confirm that there is a heat source inside the Earth. In the mantle there are zones with low viscosity, which corre