Earth Sciences (also referred to as Geosciences), which deals with basic issues surrounding our planet, plays a vital role in the area of energy and raw materials supply.
Earth Sciences comprises subjects such as geology, geography, geological informatics, paleontology, mineralogy, petrography, crystallography, geophysics, geodesy, glaciology, cartography, photogrammetry, meteorology and seismology, early-warning systems, earthquake research and polar research.
One of the really big challenges in anthropology is to date accurately the arrival of humans in the different continents. New results, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Quaternary Science, show that humans arrived in Australia a lot earlier than was previously thought.
It is generally argued that humans evolved in Africa and then spread out over the other continents progressively through time, arriving in the most distant, such as Australasia, relatively recently. The
One of the more controversial environmental issues, which emerged in the final years of the Soviet era, was the plan to dam and reverse the flow of north-flowing rivers in order to irrigate the dry southern steppes. This scheme was roundly criticised by scientists and environmentalists at the time because of fears for the impact on the Arctic Ocean and global climate. It now appears that nature performed this experiment some 90,000 years ago.
This months issue of the Journal of Quaternary
Argon traces keep tabs on climate change.
A new method for detecting tiny quantities of a rare form of the element argon may help oceanographers to trace the vast undersea currents that regulate our planet’s climate.
The technique can pick out one atom of the rare isotope argon-39 (39Ar) amid 10 million billion other atoms. That’s equivalent to detecting less than a litre of water in America’s 300-mile Lake Michigan.
Philippe Collon, a nuclear physicist at the Lamon
Natural randomness punctuated past ice ages with warm spells.
Natural randomness in the world’s climate system may have caused the frequent, fast and fleeting returns to warm conditions during past ice ages, say two German scientists 1 .
Andrey Ganopolski and Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research think that the flickering character of ice-age climate is a signature of stochastic resonance. This is the counter-intuitive phenome
In the first weeks of the New Year a team of European scientists drilled successfully through 2002 metres of ice at Dome Concordia, high on East Antarctica`s plateau – one of the most hostile places on the planet. A specially created laboratory on the ice enabled scientists to analyse, for the first time, past climate shifts within hours of each 3 m length of core being drilled – rather than waiting months or years for detailed study back in European labs. The team, working on a seven-year Antarctic
While the rest of world has warmed, Antarctica has grown chillier, scientists say. According to a new study, air temperature on the southernmost continent fell by 0.7 degree Celsius per decade between 1986 and 2000 – a cooling trend that has come with ecological consequences.
The findings may come as a surprise to climate researchers. Conventional wisdom holds that the polar regions should be the first to show the effects of global warming. And previous work has indeed detected increased t