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News

Great Barrier Reef has died and recovered before

It’s hard to imagine Earth without the Great Barrier Reef, yet with the threats confronting it — including ocean warming and acidification — its demise is a possibility marine scientists are studying. A new study of how sea-level rise and sedimentation have impacted the reef over the last 30,000 years, however, shows it might be more resilient than previously thought.

22 Aug 2018

European mammals will struggle under climate change

As temperatures on Earth rise, many animals have already begun migrating to more amenable climates, shifting their ranges. But not all animals will be able to relocate, according to a new study in the journal Diversity and Distributions.

20 Aug 2018

New suspect emerges in theft of Earth's surface iron

Iron is the fourth-most common element in Earth’s crust, but why there isn’t more found near the surface in continental crust has been a long-standing question among geologists. In a new study, scientists implicate an overlooked mineral culprit in the theft of iron from continental crust: garnet. But not everybody is ready to exonerate the long-implicated magnetite.

17 Aug 2018

Bolts of insight on earthly gamma ray showers

A handful of times between 2014 and 2016, an array of ground detectors placed in Utah’s western desert sensed something in thunderstorms that occasionally raged overhead: showers of gamma rays — the highest energy waves in the electromagnetic spectrum — occurring alongside lightning bolts.

15 Aug 2018

Red Planet Roundup: August 2018

With two rovers patrol­ling the surface of Mars, six spacecraft orbiting above it, and scientists here on Earth studying the Red Planet from afar, new findings are announced often. 

13 Aug 2018

Natural solutions could save $50 billion in Gulf Coast flood damages

As coastal development skyrockets and the effects of climate change escalate, flooding is becoming an increasingly common threat. A new statistical analysis of the costs and benefits of various coastal protection methods along the U.S. Gulf Coast suggests communities could prevent a significant amount of flood damage by implementing a combination of natural defenses and built infrastructure.

10 Aug 2018

Searching for the volcanic origins of iron ore

Most iron ore comes from sedimentary deposits. However, a sizeable minority is mined from volcanic rocks, including those found along the Coastal Cordillera of northern Chile, and in Kiruna, Sweden.

09 Aug 2018

Seismic waves are blind to water

Geoscientists use the seismic waves produced by earthquakes to image the internal structure of the planet. Some seismic waves travel through liquids, while others do not, which is how we know, for instance, that Earth has a solid inner core and a liquid outer core.

08 Aug 2018

A rocky source of nitrogen

Calculations of the planet’s nitrogen balance have always been off: plants and soils seem to sequester far more nitrogen than expected. The atmosphere has long been thought of as the only major source of nitrogen, but a new study indicates an additional source: as much as a quarter of Earth’s terrestrial nitrogen may be supplied by eroding bedrock.

07 Aug 2018

Speartips point at south-to-north Clovis dispersal

During the last ice age, long before people first entered North America, much of the Canadian and American Rockies were buried under massive ice sheets. As the ice age waned about 13,000 years ago, an ice-free corridor 1,500-kilometers long and several hundred kilometers wide opened east of the Rocky Mountains.

02 Aug 2018

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