Search Results for: ocean

Events rare, but scientists call for public awareness, warning system

A dozen major earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the past 500 years, and several have generated tsunamis. The most recent major earthquake, a magnitude 8.1 in 1946, resulted in a tsunami that killed a reported 1,600 people.

With nearly twenty mill

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced that it will conduct an urgent study of the large-scale earthquake which occurred off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia on December 26, 2004. The study will be the first to observe the actual epicenter of the earthquake that devastated coastal regions in Asian countries along the Indian Ocean coastline.

JAMSTEC is a partner in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program that

The African continent is slowly being pulled apart and new data collected by University of Leeds and Royal Holloway, University of London researchers suggests that molten rock from deep within the Earth is helping the rifting. Their findings, which help explain how continents split apart, are published in Nature this week.

Ethiopia sits on a boundary where a tectonic plate is being split into two and over several million years a new ocean basin is forming. The movement of plates o

Scientists have discovered a new group of microbes thriving in extreme conditions deep in the Mediterranean Sea. Their existence in such hostile environments hints at the possibility of life on other planets.

The European consortium carrying out the three-year Biodeep project, which includes researchers from the University of Essex, now plans to test how the microbes tolerate these unique conditions. The group hopes their adaptations could be exploited in medicine, agricultu

Milky, turquoise-colored “dead zones,” some as large as the U.S. State of New Jersey, that are appearing repeatedly off the coast of southwest Africa, may be a sign of things to come for other areas of the coastlines of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Toxic gas eruptions, bubbling up from the ocean floor, kill sea life, annoy human seaside residents, and may even intensify global warming. But the simple sardine may save the day, according to a study from the Pew Institute for Ocean Scien

People that live in Florida would expect the sands from the state beaches to blow into the air, and usually don’t think of the sands and dust from the Saharan Desert twirling around them. However, winds do carry the desert dust across the Atlantic Ocean, and scientists have been studying what they do to Florida Thunderstorms.

Scientists have discovered that these tiny particles of dust from the Saharan desert can affect thunderstorms in Florida in various ways. Dust affects