Geology

Klyuchevskoy (pronounced Kloo-shef-skoy), a stratovolcano located in the north central region of the Kamchatka Peninsula, is blasting ash up to 32,000 feet in the air, and has diverted air traffic headed toward the Far East. This is the largest eruption to ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 8 2017 - 8:08am

Envisat Captures Mount Gamkonora Eruption

Indonesia’s Mount Gamkonora volcano is spewing hot ash and smoke into the air, as seen in this image taken by the MERIS instrument aboard ESA’s satellite Envisat, causing more than 8000 people to be evacuated amid fears of an imminent eruption, according t ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 11 2007 - 1:44pm

Geologists Witness Unique Volcanic Mudflow

Volcanologist Sarah Fagents from the University of Hawaii at Manoa had an amazing opportunity to study volcanic hazards first hand, when a volcanic mudflow broke through the banks of a volcanic lake at Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand. Fagents and colleagues w ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 13 2007 - 10:25am

Portable Core X-Rays- Chemical Analysis In A Rucksack

A new substance analyzer has been developed by the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics and Automation in Moscow. Its functionality is to automatically determine the content of up to 20 chemical elements in the periodic table betw ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 22 2007 - 11:35am

Jurassic Ice- As Glaciers Melt, Ancient DNA May Be Resurrected

The DNA of ancient microorganisms, long frozen in glaciers, may return to life as the glaciers melt, according to a paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists at Rutgers and Boston University. The ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 6 2007 - 6:00pm

Will Melting Permafrost Accelerate Climate Change?

Permafrost, the perpetually frozen foundation of the north, serves like a platform underneath vast expanses of northern forests and wetlands that are rooted in many northern ecosystems. But rising atmospheric temperatures are accelerating rates of permafro ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 9 2007 - 11:04pm

Determining The Center Of The Earth

Pressures and temperatures at the Earth’s core are stupendous – more than 3.5 Mbar and 7000K – and currently it is impossible to recreate these conditions in the laboratory. Our information about the core comes from observing the way that seismic waves tr ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 16 2007 - 10:03am

Breakthrough In Geological Dating On The Horizon

The earth sciences rely on highly accurate timing to unravel past causes and effects, and understand the forces driving many events from ice ages to mass extinctions. Other scientific disciplines, such as evolutionary biology and climate science, in turn d ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 22 2007 - 4:37pm

Whew- Next Ice Age Delayed By Rising CO2 Levels

Throughout Earth's history, 90,000 out of every 100,000 years have been ice ages- and it's been 12,000 years since the last one. You can thank global warming, it seems. Future ice ages may be delayed by up to 500,000 years by greenhouse gas emiss ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2007 - 12:59pm

How Volcanoes Made Our Oxygen-rich Atmosphere Possible

Volcanoes sometimes get a bad rap for belching CO2 but today it turns out they're also responsible for the air we breathe. National Science Foundation-funded research published this week in the journal Nature indicates that billions of years ago, when ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2007 - 4:34pm