1 July 2020
How to design continents for maximum tides
A new study simulates ocean tides on imaginary Earth-like worlds, revealing the limits of topography’s influence on tidal energy
17 June 2020
Vulnerable carbon stores twice as high where permafrost subsidence is factored in, new research finds
Sinking terrain caused by the loss of ice and soil mass in permafrost is causing deeper thaw than previously thought and making vulnerable twice as much carbon as estimates that don’t account for this shifting ground.
Utah’s arches continue to whisper their secrets
Seismic studies assess the stresses and health of iconic rock structures.
8 June 2020
Gold mining with mercury poses health threats for miles downstream
A new study in the Peruvian Amazon shows that the assumption that distance lowers risk from mercury contamination doesn’t hold up.
4 June 2020
Hydrologists show environmental damage from fog reduction is observable from outer space
A new paper presents the first clear evidence that the relationship between fog levels and vegetation status is measurable using remote sensing. The discovery opens up the potential to easily and rapidly assess fog’s impact on ecological health across large land masses — as compared to painstaking ground-level observation.
18 May 2020
How climate killed corals
New study shows multiple factors joined forces to devastate the Great Barrier Reef in 2016.
12 May 2020
New evidence of watery plumes on Jupiter’s moon Europa
Scientists are keen to explore beneath Europa’s thick blanket of ice, and they can do so indirectly by hunting for evidence of activity emanating from below. A new study published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, did exactly this.
Sounding Saturn’s depths with its seismic icy rings
The secrets of Saturn’s veiled interior are leaking out by way of the planet’s spectacular rings, according to a line of research that has taken four decades to come to fruition. In the last few years, what was first considered a sort of wacky hypothesis – that scientists can use Saturn’s rings to learn about its structure — has turned into a singular window into Saturn’s surprisingly fluid and leviathan depths.
6 May 2020
Going against the trend
Global warming has affected the entire planet’s surface, except for one particular area of the ocean, which until 2015 had bucked the trend. A research team has now unraveled what was going on.
27 April 2020
New Mexico badlands help researchers understand past Martian lava flows (video)
Planetary scientists are using a volcanic flow field in New Mexico to puzzle out how long past volcanic eruptions on Mars might have lasted, a finding that could help researchers determine if Mars was ever hospitable to life. People don’t usually think of New Mexico as a volcanically active place, but it has some of the youngest (geologically speaking) large lava flows in the continental United States.