Search Results for: ocean

The December issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: impact of shifts in the North Atlantic current on European climate; new method for estimating elevations of Earth’s ancient land surfaces; evidence of terrestrial causes of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction; evidence of a major Precambrian asteroid impact in northwestern Australia; the relationship of intensified hydrologic cycles and global heat transfer during greenhouse phases of E

As millions of holidaymakers will testify, the Mediterranean is uniquely clear – and blue – unlike the cloudy grey of many coastal waters. But how many of its grateful bathers realise that the Med is so crystal clear because it’s the ocean equivalent of the Sahara desert?

A Leeds-led team of international scientists studying the fragile marine ecosystem of the Eastern Mediterranean has found that the reason the waters are so transparent is an acute shortage of phosphates – vital el

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, ninety percent of marine species disappeared and life on land suffered greatly during the world’s largest mass extinction. The cause of this great dying has baffled scientists for decades, and recent speculations invoke asteroid impacts as a kill mechanism. Yet a new study published in the December issue of Geology provides strong indications that the extinction cause did not come from the heavens but from Earth itself.

An intern

If you run into Ed Saff at a cocktail party and ask him what he does for a living, the mathematician is likely to reply that he is working on a “method for creating the perfect poppy-seed bagel.” Then he’ll pause and add, “Maybe that’s not the most accurate description, but it’s the most digestible.”

More accurately, Saff, who is a mathematics professor at Vanderbilt, has been working with his colleague Associate Professor of Mathematics Doug Hardin to come up with a new and improv

Burgeoning marine life database tops 5 million records, 38,000 species
Scientists add over 4 million new records, 13,000 species in 2004;
Exponential growth of “information seaway” tops Census highlights

Even in Europe and the best studied seas, the rapid ongoing discovery of new marine species shows no end in sight, according to the world’s first Census of Marine Life, a massive collaboration to catalog and map marine species worldwide involving hundreds of scientists in

Two researchers at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah have offered an explanation for the recent decline in Georgia’s blue crab population that has devastated one of the state’s most important coastal fisheries.

In an article in the November/December issue of the American Scientist, Richard F. Lee and Marc E. Frischer, working on a grant from the Georgia Sea Grant Program at the University of Georgia, say their research shows that Georgia’s recent