Japan, being especially prone to earthquakes due to it's tectonic plates placement, had a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit on April 16, 2016 but it came to an abrupt halt. Scientist believe it's because of a volcano. Researchers think that a magma chamber under the Aso volcano stopped it. This shows us how two earth related things can interact. Researchers reached this conclusion when they directly went to visit the site and spent multiple days where the volcano and the earthquake is located. This discovery could help researchers more accurately anticipate earthquakes' duration relative to their interaction with volcanoes, according to seismologist Gregory Beroza, deputy director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and a professor of geophysics at Stanford University. I personally think this is super cool, because it shows how two things which at one point had the capability to do so much damage to the environment, used each other to create something positive which saved the environment and the people near it.
http://www.livescience.com/57055-utah-great-salt-lake-shrinking.html
The area of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, California is slowly decreasing. In the last century, the lake has gone from 1600 square miles to about 1050 square miles. The reasoning for this is because of human activity mainly. The water is being diverted to rivers, mainly for agriculture purposes. Apparently three quarters of the lake bed is now exposed. Researches have said that even with conservations from humans, the lake levels will continue to decrease due to climate change. I find this extremely interesting because two years ago I went to visit Salt Lake. It smelt really weird and there were a ton of bugs, but i thought it was nice. The lake looked extremely low, so this is kind of a connecting point in my head. Half of the mass of Eurasia and India is missing, new research finds, and may have been swallowed up by the Earth's mantle.
If so, that would be a surprise, as geoscientists thought that continental crust the kind that makes up major landmasses was too buoyant to dive down into the mantle, the pliable middle layer of the planet upon which the crust rides. "It used to be thought that the mantle and the crust interacted only in a relatively minor way," study researcher David Rowley, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. Even after accounting for the ruched bits of crust that climbed upward to form the Himalayas, the excess that squeezed out the sides to form southeast Asia, and the crust that eroded over 60 million years and ended up in the oceans, Rowley and his colleagues couldn't explain where half of the original mass of India and Eurasia went. Geoscientists have long known that dense oceanic crust can be "recycled" into the mantle this is the geologic process that happens at subduction zones like the one off the coast of California. Oceanic crust slides under less dense continental crust like a conveyer belt and, under pressure, becomes ductile and gooey, mixing in with the mantle. But because continental crust is so buoyant, researchers thought it acted more like a pool raft: Push it down, and it will just pop back up again. http://www.livescience.com/56440-chunk-of-india-and-eurasia-missing.html Disastrous floods like those seen during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which killed 159 people in the United States, destroyed neighborhoods in New York and caused an estimated $50 billion in damages, may hit New York City 17 times more often in the next century, a new study finds.
The storm surge, or storm-linked rise in sea level from Sandy, reached 9.2 feet (2.8 meters) in New York City, and the storm tide the combined height of the normal ocean tide and the storm surge reached a record height of 11.3 feet (3.44 meters) there. "If you don't account for rising sea level and possible change in storm activity, you're underestimating future flood risk." In the new study, the researchers examined how the frequency of Sandy-level floods in New York City has changed from 1800 to the present. To do this, they relied on historical data going back to 1856 to estimate past sea levels and storm surges and on computer simulations based on moderate greenhouse gas emissions to model future sea levels and storm intensity. "Our model for the first time pulls together probabilistic estimates for sea-level rise and storm surge to produce long-term predictions of flood stages," Lin said in a statement. In addition, based solely on how the rate of sea-level rise is expected to accelerate over the 21st century, the researchers estimated that flooding on a par with Hurricane Sandy would become 4.4 times more likely by the end of this century. Even if the number of strong hurricanes does not increase between now and 2100, sea-level rise alone will likely increase the frequency of Sandy-like events, according to study co-author Ben Horton, a professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Science at Rutgers University. Based on historical climate data and modeling of future climate conditions and storm surges, the scientists found that changes in the size, intensity and tracks of hurricanes may lead to a more limited threefold increase in such flooding, but may also make this kind of flooding 17 times more likely. However, these new findings suggest that even if hurricanes occur at the same frequency and strength as they do now, "our estimates suggest the frequency of high storm surges will significantly increase based on rising sea level," Lin said in a statement .http://www.livescience.com/56447-hurricane-floods-more-likely-climate-change.html As more ice is melting people are wondering what the dangers are for us. A recent study on the Greenland Ice Sheet provides insight to climate change from past years and today. Using unique research methods scientists are able to establish new estimates of ice loss. This research is a great step in trying to get a better understanding how geological process below earth's surface influence ice loss and ultimately sea level rise. Going below the surface of the ice sheets scientists are able to accomplish a better understanding of activity beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. This study is a great first step to understanding ice loss from a geological perspective and understanding how climate change is going to impact us in a bigger way then humans ever believed possible.
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Five meteorologists who were trapped for two weeks after polar bears surrounded their weather station are now able to leave. They had been holed up in their facility on the Izvestiy TSIK Islands — around 2,800 miles from Moscow — after around a dozen of the animals moved into the area. The meteorologists ran out of signal flares that they had been using to scare away the bears, which had previously eaten their guard dog. Russian officials had feared the siege could last for another month, the time it would take for a specially dispatched ship to reach the islands in the Kara Sea. But on Tuesday night a research vessel took a detour to assist the incarcerated weathermen. A ship chartered by Russia's state-run oil firm Rosneft frightened away the bears using its helicopter, before resupplying the weather station with more flares and puppies. "They came around midnight [1 p.m. ET on Tuesday]," said Shevchenko, who is based in the city of Arkhangelsk, 1,200 miles south of the weather facility. The puppies are not yet big enough to deter the bears, but the station is planning to draft in a replacement adult guard dog as soon as possible. Some of the bears had taken to sleeping directly outside the windows of the remote outpost. There was no risk of the researchers starving because they had a year's worth of food, but they were forced to take dangerous trips to a nearby building housing the facility's diesel generator, toting a gun for protection, according to Shevchenko. Polar bears are an endangered species. In Russia, it's a crime to shoot them unless in self-defense. The bears usually leave the islands in the summer, but this time they were stranded by the melting ice, an apparent sign of climate change, according to Shevchenko. "They've stayed on the island because there's nowhere for them to go," he said. The animals suffer from global warming because it shrinks the floating ice that forms their main hunting ground. According to the environmental group the World Wide Fund for Nature, known as the WWF, this has prompted some polar bears to go near human habitats in search for food. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rescuers-reach-russian-meteorologists-trapped-polar-bears-n648021 No one is quite sure how many forest elephants there are (the Great Elephant Census didn’t count them), but there are far fewer of these elephants than their savannah cousins. Like savannah elephants, forest elephants are dealing with losses from poaching, habitat loss and human conflict. But researchers collected data on more than 1,200 elephants that visited a forest clearing in the southwestern Central African Republic between 1990 and 2013, and have now used that data to make some startling observations about how forest elephants differ from savannah elephants. And forest elephants breed only once every five to six years, compared with every three or four in savannah elephants. This means that a population of forest elephants would double in size at less than half the rate as savannah elephants. https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/iucn-votes-ivory-trade-elephants%E2%80%99-future-looks-bleak HONOLULU — The world's largest living primate has been listed as critically endangered, making four of the six great ape species only one step away from extinction, according to a report released Sunday at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii. Of all the great ape species — the eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan, chimpanzee and bonobo — only the chimpanzee and bonobo are not considered critically endangered. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, cited illegal hunting in downgrading the status of the eastern gorilla on its Red List of Endangered Species. It is the most comprehensive analysis of endangered species and guides government policy around the world, said Cristian Samper, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society. For the gorillas of the Congo, where the majority of the population lives, conservation will be a struggle because of political instability, said primatologist Russell
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AuthorKelly Weber |