Archive for Earth
September 2, 2008 at 10:31 am
· Filed under Earth ·Tagged caribbean, lost world
Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, are set to explore the world
Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, are set to explore the world’s deepest undersea volcanoes and find out what lives in a ‘lost world’ five kilometres beneath the Caribbean.
The team of researchers led by Dr Jon Copley has been awarded £462,000 by the Natural Environment Research Council to explore the Cayman Trough, which lies between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. This rift in the Caribbean seafloor plunges to a depth of more than 5000 metres below sea level. It contains the world’s deepest chain of undersea volcanoes, which have yet to be explored.
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August 3, 2008 at 9:21 am
· Filed under Earth ·Tagged Cold, Heat, Ice, Tropical, Tropical Region
Geoscientists have long presumed that, like today, the tropics remained warm throughout Earth’s last major glaciation 300 million years ago. New evidence, however, indicates that cold temperatures in fact episodically gripped these equatorial latitudes at that time.
Geologist Gerilyn Soreghan of Oklahoma University found evidence for this conclusion in the preservation of an ancient glacial landscape in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. Three hundred million years ago, the region was part of the tropics. The continents then were assembled into the supercontinent Pangaea.
Soreghan and colleagues published their results in the August 2008, issue of the journal Geology.
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August 2, 2008 at 5:55 am
· Filed under Earth ·Tagged airbone, arctic, eclips, solar
ABOARD A JET ABOVE THE ARCTIC OCEAN – A total of 147 observers from around the world had a perfect view of this morning’s total eclipse of the sun, thanks to an 2,189-mile airlift to a grandstand seat 36,000-feet above the Arctic Ocean at a point between the uninhabited northern coast of Greenland and the Norwegian island group of Svalbard.
The contingent of eclipse watchers were onboard an LTU Airbus A330-200 long-range jet, racing the moon’s shadow like paparazzi scrambling alongside a celebrity’s passing automobile.
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July 19, 2008 at 9:00 am
· Filed under Earth, Global Warming ·Tagged eruption, Ocean, volcanic, volcano
Undersea volcanic activity triggered a mass extinction of marine life and buried a thick mat of organic matter on the sea floor about 93 million years ago, which became a major source of oil, according to a new study.
“It certainly caused an extinction of several species in the marine environment,” said University of Alberta Earth and Atmospheric Science researcher Steven Turgeon. “It wasn’t as big as what killed off the dinosaurs, but it was what we call an extreme event in the Earth’s history, something that doesn’t happen very often.”
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July 18, 2008 at 6:28 am
· Filed under Earth, World News ·Tagged America, Antarctica, north
A lone granite boulder found against all odds high atop a glacier in Antarctica may provide additional key evidence to support a theory that parts of the southernmost continent once were connected to North America hundreds of millions of years ago.
Writing in the July 11 edition of the journal Science, an international team of U.S. and Australian investigators describe their findings, which were made in the Transantarctic Mountains, and their significance to the problem of piecing together what an ancient supercontinent, called Rodinia, looked like. The U.S. investigators were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
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