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22 July 2013
Busy beavers capture carbon
A few environmental problem-solvers have proposed drawing carbon out of the air and burying it to reduce greenhouse gasses and curb climate change. Maybe they could take some tips from nature’s own geoengineers – beavers – which have been sequestering carbon for thousands of years in the ponds and meadows created by their dams. A new study finds that, due to decreasing populations, much less carbon is getting tucked away by beavers than in the past.
19 July 2013
Most of Europe’s extreme rains caused by ‘rivers’ in the atmosphere
Heavy rainfall brought severe flooding last month to swaths of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and other Central European nations, raising water levels in one city to the highest they’ve reached since the 1500s. New research finds that most of the continent’s extreme rainfalls since at least 1979 have spilled from fast flows of warm, moisture-laden air known as atmospheric rivers.
4 June 2013
Return to Tohoku – Taking a big quake’s temperature
There’s a hole in the bottom of the ocean near Japan, the deepest ever drilled for science. It leads to the heart of one of the world’s most dangerous faults, the one that unleashed the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which devastated Japan’s east coast. The earthquake’s power astonished geologists, who didn’t think the fault was capable of such destruction.To find out why the quake was so massive, an international team drilled through more than 800 meters of rock, seven kilometers beneath the waves, to take the fault’s temperature.
26 April 2013
Geophysicist challenges fracking’s bad rep
Mark Zoback, a geophysicist at Stanford University, cringes at the word “fracking”. He doesn’t oppose this controversial process of extracting fossil fuels from shale rock, or hydraulic fracturing. He just laments the stigma of its nickname.
12 October 2012
On the early lives of diamonds
Diamonds may not be forever, but they do last an incredibly long time. The forces in the Earth’s interior that shape these famously durable gems have long been mysterious. A new study looks at teensy chunks of an inner zone of the planet that can get caught within diamonds’ crystal structures. It presents new evidence that diamonds often take a long ride in the planet’s fluidly moving gut before rising to the surface.
2 June 2010
(UPDATED*) Sinkholes: A chronic geohazard
Guatemala has been struck by the full wrath of nature in the last week – first, the volcano Pacaya erupted, killing at least three people, and blanketing the region in ash. Soon after, tropical storm Agatha passed through the country near the Guatemala-Mexico border killing at least 152 people. Heavy rainfalls led to widespread flooding and the formation of a dramatic sight – a sinkhole over 20 meters (65.6 feet) …
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.