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16 December 2009
Can Scientists Convince the Growing Number of Global Warming Skeptics?
Recent public opinion polls show the public is less certain that global climate change is happening, said Connie Roser-Renouf of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., at the ED31C: Education and Communication for Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness I session on Wednesday. Further, November’s hacking and distribution of University of Anglia climate researchers’ emails prompted a surge of creationist rhetoric disputing global climate …
Emiliani Lecture and the Tough Task of Paleoceanographers
The Emiliani lecture (PP31E), given in honor of one of the fathers of the field of paleoceangraphy, Cesare Emiliani, draws just about everyone at AGU who’s ever thought about paleoclimate, even if it was just “huh, paleoclimate and paleooceans are cool.” This year, Delia Oppo, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute was the guest lecturer, presenting on “Holocene Changes in the Indonesian Throughtflow region.” I’m a student, and I’m taking my …
Earthquakes in the Lone Star State
The old saw is that everything in Texas is big: trucks, hats, even garlic bread (a.k.a. Texas toast). But one thing that has never been big in the Lone Star State is seismic activity. So when I went to the S31E. Observation and Analysis of Natural and Induced Microearthquakes II presentation, I was really surprised to hear that the Dallas Ft. Worth Metroplex has been experiencing earthquakes recently, likely caused …
Exciting Sessions!
On Tuesday, the session GC22A: Thirty Years of Progress: Advancements in Climate Change Projections Since the 1979 Charney Report (on climate change) was so well attended that it was standing-room-only–for quite a while. There were so many people clammering to hear the presentations that the room was overpacked….and security had to ask people who were standing to leave the room per the fire marshall. Ah, a new metric for how …
15 December 2009
Twinkle Twinkle Little Eruption
I had this friend when I was a kid who had the best toys. It might ruin my carefully crafted aura of masculinity, but my favorite was the Lite Brite. There was just something soothing about the glowing of those red and green dots against their black backboard. I felt that same sense of calm when I saw an infrared photo of three Alaskan volcanos taken by the ASTER (Advanced …
Twisters on Mars
The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie as a child, but the tornado scene gave me fascinating nightmares for decades. That’s why I grabbed onto a new study about Martian dust devils. It turns out there are way more dust devils on Mars than scientists thought. These swirling clouds are visible on video from the Mars Spirit rover in higher concentrations than previously predicted by satellite images of their …
What Does More Atmospheric Carbon Mean for Plants?
Plants assemble themselves with a common set of building blocks: light, water, a carbon source, and a variety of other nutrients, like nitrogen in nitrate form. There’s usually plenty of carbon in the atmosphere, and as more carbon is pumped out into the atmosphere that reservoir only increases. The idea that photosynthetic organisms, either forests or phytoplankton, will simply ramp up their photosynthetic rates and act as giant sponges for …
Smile for the Camera, Mercury
I’ve always thought that Mercury has gotten a bad rap. It isn’t pretty like Neptune, large like Jupiter or saddled with a funny moniker like Uranus. Only Pluto is so slighted but that guy isn’t even a planet anymore. In March 2011, however, NASA’s MESSENGER (Mercury Surface Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft will enter into orbit around our tiny, gray friend, giving it a well-deserved fifteen minutes of fame. …
Light and the Canopy
A tree falls in a forest: the question isn’t whether it makes a sound or not, but what other plants take advantage of the light that streams in through the newly-opened hole in the canopy, according to a talk at B21C: Adaptation of Vegetation to Changes in Environmental Forcing II. Tropical forests are complicated and are subject to all kinds of compounding variables, but in boreal forests and environments—particularly those …
A Cold Drip: Emergency Water from the Air
Flash back to a sultry New Orleans evening a few years ago. I’m sitting on a porch with a bottle of beer sweating into my hands. The chug-chugging air conditioner mounted precariously in a second story window drips stale water into my hair. There’s water in the air all right. And as shown at GC21A: Water Supply Management and Security I posters, we already know how to get it into …
GeoSpace is a blog on Earth and space science, managed by AGU’s Public Information staff. The blog features posts by AGU writers and guest contributors on all sorts of relevant science topics, but with a focus on new research and geo and space sciences-related stories that are currently in the news.