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15 December 2015
Cold reaction has hot implications for evolution of life
When carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas mingle deep underground, they transform into methane and water—the building blocks of life.
Scientists once thought the reaction, called Sabatier synthesis, could only proceed above 150 degrees Celsius. Life, they thought, was conceived deep in the scalding vents of an ancient ocean. But the Sabatier process also runs cooler, finds a new study presented at the 2015 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. With the right catalyst, the reaction works at room temperature, the study found.
Dream Car Type-S
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Big bad space wolf
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Space Engineers
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
14 December 2015
ACME solution to gas leaks
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Waves on Titan
Stanford University’s Miles Traer is, once again, cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
22 December 2014
Veteran geophysical tool preps for new horizons at Europa
Jupiter’s moon Europa has tantalized scientists with its potential for harboring life ever since Galileo first spotted the icy satellite in 1610. If living matter is bubbling anywhere in our solar system, they suspect, it would be below the moon’s icy shell, where a presumed ocean of salty water meets a mineral-rich interior. But because scientists can’t peer beneath the ice, they must rely on data beamed back by passing spacecraft. A proposed NASA mission called Europa Clipper could be sent to the moon in the next decade—and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA want their instrument to be onboard.
All warmed up and nowhere to go: The missing El Niño of 2014
In 1997, a record-breaking El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean brought rain to California, flooding to Peru, and drought to Africa. Earlier this year scientists said that warm currents in the Pacific Ocean presaged the biggest El Niño event since the record-breaking 1997-1998 season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put the likelihood of a major Northern Hemisphere El Niño at 80 percent. But despite high expectations, the predicted El Niño of 2014 has ultimately fizzled. In a talk entitled “Who Killed the 2014 El Niño?” at the American Geophysical Union conference Thursday, NOAA oceanographer and past president of AGU Michael McPhaden laid out the leading suspects in this climatic whodunnit – including weak westerly winds, contrary trends elsewhere in the ocean, and overall climate-related ocean warming.
Picture Perfect and Water Wise: Images May Someday Predict the Hazards of Volcanic Gas
Earlier this year, superheated water within Japan’s Mount Ontake triggered a hydrothermal explosion. Scientists monitoring the volcano had seen no signs of impending danger. The resulting steam-triggered eruption killed 57 people. Clusters of earthquakes often precede major eruptions of lava and ash. The same is not true for smaller steam-triggered eruptions of gas like the Ontake event. But those are the sorts of events that Társilo Girona would like to predict, and he believes that cameras may be the key.
19 December 2014
Lightning strikes Venus
Scientists have detected electromagnetic signals emanating from Venus’s thick cloud layer, bolstering the case for lightning on the planet. The Venus Express spacecraft, which recently ended its mission after eight years, recorded electromagnetic pulses about 217 miles (300 kilometers) above the planet’s surface, said Richard Hart, a graduate student at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
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.