Earth Sciences

A team of Ohio State University researchers has returned from an expedition in southeastern Alaska with the longest ice core ever drilled from a mountainous glacier.

The core measures 460 meters (1,509 feet) and is 150 meters (492 feet) longer than the previous longest core – a record of ice from the Guliya ice cap in western China that eventually relinquished a climate record stretching back 760,000 years – the oldest such record retrieved to date.

Until the new core is analyzed in

Arantxa Aranburu, doctor of the University of the Basque Country and lecturer of the Department of Geology, has proved that the bones of Homo heidelbergensis found in Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, are even older than thought.

In the gallery of Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, a speleothem was found during a stonecutting, over the bones of the ancestors of the Neanderthals, the Homo heidelbergensis . Speleohtem is a carbonate precipitate, that is, it is made of the same material

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Part of International Research Group Refuting Popular Theory

In 1996, marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman published a scientifically popular hypothesis, titled Noah’s Flood Hypothesis. The researchers presented evidence of a bursting flood about 7,500 years ago in what is now the Black Sea. This, some say, supports the biblical story of Noah and the flood.

But, such a forceful flood could not have taken place, says

University at Buffalo scientists working with ice cores have solved a mystery surrounding sunspots and their effect on climate that has puzzled scientists since they began studying the phenomenon.

The research, published in a paper in the May 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, provides striking evidence that sunspots — blemishes on the sun’s surface indicating strong solar activity — do influence global climate change, but that explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth can complet

A study of the ancient Mediterranean Sea will help to produce more accurate predictions of climate change.

A team led by Royal Holloway geologist Dr Michal Kucera will map sea-surface temperature of the Mediterranean over past millennia. The data will provide a new target to test the computer models on which our predictions of climate change are based.

We currently make climate change predictions using mathematical models developed using climate records of the last two centuries. T

New measurements show that the flow of ice in the Greenland ice sheet has been accelerating since 1996 during the summer melt season. The results suggest that the ice sheet may be responding more quickly to the warming climate than previously thought.

In an article published in Science magazine’s online Sciencexpress June 7, Jay Zwally, an ICESat Project scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., Waleed Abdalati, a Polar Program scientist at NASA Headquarters, W