september 2011

New Zealand has a reputation for extreme adventure — sky diving, jet boating, bungee jumping and even “zorbing,” which sends you rolling down a hill inside a transparent plastic ball. But beyond the adrenaline sports, you’ll find unique geologic features in landscapes ranging from volcanoes and alpine peaks to beaches and rainforests.

The discovery of a woolly rhino fossil in Tibet that predates the last glacial maximum shows how these and possibly other creatures were already adapted for the cold climate to come. 

Astronomer Adam Riess and his team made a huge splash in 1998 when they announced the finding of dark energy. That work also included the discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. Riess and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery.

More than a century of mining near Johannesburg, South Africa, has left the region littered with mounds of waste and underlain by a network of abandoned mine shafts. Together, they are producing a toxic brew of acid mine drainage.

"Earth: The Operators' Manual" achieves its goal, which is to prepare us to change course and relace fossil fuels with alternative sources to blunt the impacts of global warming.

What's commonly thought of as the first bird, Archaeopteryx was first described 150 years ago this month.

For the past 10 years, geoscientists have been helping to characterize the dust that blanketed lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, hoping to determine if and how that dust may be causing long-term health problems.

The extent of Arctic sea ice shrinks each year during the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer, trading a white frozen surface for dark open ocean. Reaching its lowest annual extent by September or October, the ice grows back again through the cold and dark winter months.

In 2007, 11 retired admirals and generals from the U.S. armed forces published a report arguing that global climate changes represented a major threat to global security. That same year, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon argued in a Washington Post op-ed that the ongoing Sudanese civil conflict was, in part, attributable to climatic changes. By combining new techniques from climate physics and econometrics, my colleagues and I have found evidence that there is some truth in these statements. Indeed, the global climate can influence the outbreak of civil wars.

Mapping out how one species of early hominin branches to another has always been complicated by the rarity of complete specimens and lack of precise dating methods for fossils more than 50,000 years old. Now researchers studying the braincase, pelvis, hands and feet of a primitive hominin — which lived about the same time early Homo species were evolving — are taking full advantage of a rare, nearly complete assemblage of fossils and a new highly accurate dating method to once again redraw humankind’s ancient lineage.

The eyewitness accounts, written in columns from right to left, top to bottom, testify that there was no warning of the tsunami, no shaking to drive villagers to high ground before the wave hit, drowning rice paddies and swamping a castle moat. The entries, written by merchants, peasants and samurai, all clearly mark the time and date: just after midnight on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 1700.

On a warm afternoon in early March, the Taurus XL rocket that was prepped for launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California looked more like a giant chopstick standing on end than a potential game changer in the debate over climate change science. The barrel-shaped satellite that the rocket carried — named Glory — was designed to deliver critical information about small airborne particles called aerosols.