Global warming may decimate the top 10 feet (3 meters) or more of perennially frozen soil across the Northern Hemisphere, altering ecosystems as well as damaging buildings and roads across Canada, Alaska, and Russia. New simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that over half of the area covered by this topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2050 and as much as 90 percent by 2100. Scientists expect the thawing to increase runoff to the Arctic Ocean and relea
The effects of overfishing may have driven marbled murrelets, an endangered seabird found along the Pacific coast, to increasingly rely upon less nutritious food sources, according to a new study by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The results, to be published online by early March 2006 in the journal Conservation Biology, suggest that feeding further down the food web may have played a role in low levels of reproduction observed in contemporary murrelet population
This weeks launch of MSG-2 will ensure that satellite images continue to be available to European weather forecasters well into the next decade. It also marks a new chapter in a long-term space experiment measuring the available energy that drives the weather as a whole, and helping to establish how much the Earth is heating up.
MSG-2s main instrument is the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infra-red Imager (SEVIRI) which returns detailed 12-wavelength images of the Ear
The deep-sea scientific drilling vessel CHIKYU, owned by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and provided to the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program–jointly funded by Japan and the United States–has recently undergone successful testing operations, according to JAMSTEC-CDEX Director-General Asahiko Taira. Successful performance results are now available for the Blow Out Preventer (BOP) handling System Integration Test (SIT). Dr. Taira also reported successful pist
A team led by Dr. Patrizia Caraveo of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan discovered this cometary trail with data from NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory Archive. The discovery follows the teams discovery in 2003 using ESAs XMM-Newton of Gemingas twin X-ray tails stretching for billions of chilometers.
Together, these observations provide unique insight into the contents and density of the interstellar “ocean” Geminga is plowing thro
In the first-ever poll of European consumers, supermarkets, chefs and restaurateurs on attitudes toward seafood and the ocean, 79% said that the environmental impact of seafood is an important factor in their purchasing decisions.
The new study, commissioned by the Seafood Choices Alliance in partnership with Greenpeace, the Marine Conservation Society, WWF and the North Sea Foundation, reveals that 86% of consumers would prefer to buy seafood that is labelled as environmentally re