Search Results for: ocean

Our four-legged, five-toed ancestors conquered the land earlier and more independently than expected, say paleontologists studying newfound 345 to 359-million-year-old tracks at an eroding beach in eastern Canada.

At least six different kinds of four-limbed reptile-like animals – a.k.a. tetrapods – with five digits on their feet left their tromping prints in the mud of what was once a tropical swamp at Blue Beach, Nova Scotia. The five-digit tracks range in size from four i

In August and September of this year, three powerful icebreakers transited to the North Pole in search of a climate record stored in sediments below the Arctic Ocean floor. During the spectacular Arctic Coring Expedition (ACEX), conducted by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), 340 meters of sediment core were retrieved from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean — a true “first.” With these sediments in hand, earth scientists for the first time can move away from pure speculation about the

Antarctic whales, seals and penguins could be threatened by food shortages in the Southern Ocean. Numbers of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), a shrimp-like crustacean at the heart of the food chain, are declining. The most likely explanation is a dramatic decline in sea-ice. The results are published this week in the journal Nature.

Sea-ice is a vital feeding ground for the huge number of krill in the Southern Ocean. The new research shows that krill numbers have dropped b

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, then disappeared so completely that to find even a partially complete skeleton of a single multi-ton animal is rare. Meanwhile, the Virginia Museum of Natural History has scores of fossils of Tanytrachelos ahynis, a 12 to 18-inch reptile that also lived millions of years ago, at the same time as the earliest dinosaurs.

Tanytrachelos is a long-necked reptile that was related to the perhaps better-known nine-foot (up to t

Russian researchers have developed a small, smart and tolerant to vibrations spectrometer, which is equally reliable in the outer space and in oceanic depths. The development was performed with financial support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE). The unique device is based on a completely new principle: the light goes through an acoustooptical filter in the device.

Specialists of the Sci

Yesterday, an important milestone was reached in the development of ESA’s GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) mission, when a contract, worth €7.8 million, was signed between ESA and the Institute for Astronomical and Physical Geodesy (IAPG) from the Technical University of Munich.

The contract means that the scientific data resulting from the GOCE mission will be analysed by a consortium of 10 European universities and research institutes led by