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17 December 2014
Unmarked burial sites: where history and geophysics team up
Located about 25 miles north of Houston, Mueschke Cemetery is a historical burial ground. With its oldest headstone dating back to 1849, the cemetery is the resting place for close to 150 people, many of them soldiers killed in 150 years of American wars. But the cemetery is also known to contain dozens of unmarked graves, their locations lost over time. Now, a tool used by geologists and engineers is helping to find them: radar.
New evidence for a massive flood on the Mackenzie River 13,000 years ago
The Northern Hemisphere suddenly cooled about 12,800 years ago in an event named the Younger Dryas. Scientists have debated the cause for many years. One widely-believed explanation is that the massive but long gone Lake Agassiz in central Canada rapidly flooded fresh water east down the St. Lawrence River into the northern Atlantic Ocean. That pulse of fresh water interfered with warm ocean currents and triggered the cooling.
An updated geological timeline for the extinction of the dinosaurs
The asteroid that smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula a little more than 66 million years ago left behind the Chicxulub crater, but it also left behind something else: iridium, a rare element, which settled in a fine layer all over the world. When scientists discovered this layer between rock strata in the 1980s, it eventually led them to the crater as well, and an explanation for the disappearance of the dinosaurs. But on either side of that layer, which serves as a geological boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene, determining the age of rock is more difficult. This fuzziness makes it harder for paleontologists to piece together the timeline of life’s evolution after the mass extinction, which included the emergence of humans and all other mammals.
16 December 2014
Scientists use satellites to monitor volcano risks
A NASA team utilized satellite data to create a map of past volcanic deposits and modeled the risk to nearby towns. They found one town on a potential lava flow path and a second town at risk for mud flows. The results were presented at Monday’s poster session at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting. The group’s methodology using satellite images can serve as a template for remotely assessing volcano risk, according to the researchers.
Researchers keep an eye on walrus ice preferences
To walruses, ice means life. It’s their home base, their mating ground, and their transportation. As climate change threatens the extent of ocean ice, a new study takes a first step at determining how changing ice conditions are influencing walrus dynamics.
Scientists use drones to monitor surf zone
When ocean scientists visit the beach they pack more than sunscreen and a towel – they pack drones. Researchers show in a new study that drones can be used to cheaply and accurately monitor the movement of water in the surf zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The drones provide a new way of documenting the movement of plant and animal plankton, sediments and pollutants, including spilled oil, near the shore.
Scientists trying to create “exoplanet zoo”
Scientists are working to simulate and catalogue the properties of Earth-like planets to create an “exoplanet zoo,”—a collection of worlds with similar compositions but different levels of habitability. That’s the goal of a new modeling approach presented by Cayman Unterborn during a poster session Monday morning at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Growing forests with fire
In the summer of 2012, Heather Alexander traveled to a remote larch forest in eastern Siberia, gathered together piles of dry twigs and branches, and lit a match. Alexander, a biologist at the University of Texas at Brownsville, is a fire starter. Her work aims to understand whether increasingly common fires in the boreal larch forests of north-eastern Siberia are unleashing more carbon into the atmosphere or, paradoxically, helping the forests capture and store atmospheric carbon by promoting the growth of new stands of trees.
18 December 2013
Santa Cruz Island tsunami more massive than previously thought
An 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck 70 kilometers west of Santa Cruz Island in the Solomon Islands Feb. 6. It triggered a tsunami that swept through tribal towns and wooden huts along a 20-kilometer stretch of coastline.
17 December 2013
Former German mining site becomes laboratory for carbon dioxide storage research
A local legend circulates in the Upper Neckar Valley in southeast Germany. It tells of a worker, a healthy, strong young man, who lay down one day beside the railroad tracks for a midday nap. The man never woke up, prompting speculation about his death that endures until today.
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.