Search Results for: ocean

Mission controllers cross their fingers whenever the Sun is stormy and their spacecraft have to fly over the South Atlantic. There, even satellites in low orbits suffer many hits by atomic bullets from the Sun. Troublesome faults occur in electronic systems and astronauts see flashes in their eyes. The Earth’s magnetic field, which shields our planet against charged atomic particles coming from outer space, is curiously weak in that region.

The South Atlantic Anomaly, as the ex

A model of the leak dynamics of the oil tanker, Prestige, that sunk off the coast of Spain in 2002, may help assess recovery and cleanup methods for future tanker accidents, according to an international team of researchers.

“We believe that 14,000 metric tons (15,400 British tons) of oil were recovered from the tanker using the shuttle-bag system, and that between 16,000 (17,600) and 23,000 (25,300) tons of oil are still in the ship,” says Dr. Bernd J. Haupt, senior research as

For the last three years evidence has been building that the impact of a comet or asteroid triggered the biggest mass extinction in Earth history, but new research from a team headed by a University of Washington scientist disputes that notion.

In a paper published Jan. 20 by Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the researchers say they have found no evidence for an impact at the time of “the Great Dying” 250 million years ago. Instead, their research indi

Some massive earthquakes like the one that generated the recent tsunami in South Asia are preceded by slight sinking along nearby coastlines two to five years before the rupture, according to a new study by scientists from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

If coastal subsidence is common before subduction zone quakes, areas such as those ringing the Pacific Rim could be on th

Far northern rivers are discharging increasing amounts of freshwater into the Arctic Ocean, due to intensified precipitation caused by global warming, say researchers at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in the United Kingdom.

Water exchange between the ocean, atmosphere, and land is called the global hydrological cycle. As Earth’s climate warms, the rate of this exchange is expected to increase. As part of this process, high-latitude precipitation and, c

Some anticipated the ’collision of the century’: the vast, drifting B15-A iceberg was apparently on collision course with the floating pier of ice known as the Drygalski ice tongue. Whatever actually happens from here, Envisat’s radar vision will pierce through Antarctic clouds to give researchers a ringside seat.

A collision was predicted to have already occurred by now by some authorities, but B-15A’s drift appears to have slowed markedly in recent days,