News by Subject Earth Science

From above, the Antarctic Ice Sheet might look like a calm, perpetual ice blanket that has covered Antarctica for millions of years. But the ice sheet can be thousands of meters deep at its thickest, and it hides hundreds of meltwater lakes where its base meets the continent's bedrock. Deep below the surface, some of these lakes fill and drain continuously through a system of waterways that eventually drain into the ocean.

"Snowball Earth" is the most extreme climate event in Earth's history, when it was completely engulfed in ice. The theory of its existence has faced two challenges - how life survived and variations in rock formations from the time implying changes to the climate cycle. New study shows that changes to Earth's orbit caused the ice sheets to advance and retreat, providing ice-free 'oases' for animal life and explaining variations in rock formations.

ORNL story tips: Powered by nature, get on the bus, accelerating methane, helping JET soar, charged up planning and building a better thermostat

In 2016, researchers from the University of Liège (Belgium) proposed a new definition of the geological boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods (359 million years). This new definition has been tested by hundreds of researchers around the world and the results are now compiled in a special issue of the journal Palaeodiversity & Palaeoenvironments.

A 15-year reciprocal transplant study on Guam's native cycad tree, Cycas micronesica, by the Plant Physiology Laboratory at the University of Guam's Western Pacific Tropical Research Center has revealed that acute adaptation to local soil conditions occurs among the tree population and is important in the survival rate of transplanted cycads.

The stage is set for a new carbon storage economy to emerge along the Gulf Coast, according to a study led by The University of Texas at Austin, with the region offering ample opportunities to capture and store carbon, and recent state and federal incentives giving an added push to get started.

To understand the flow of fluids in finite volume in radial geometry, the collaborative team of researchers carried out a study through combination of experiment and simulation on the dynamics when a fluid sandwiched between the layers of another with different viscosity. It is observed that radial growth of limited volume of one of the fluids results in the persistent interfacial dynamics in contrast to the transient nature of the rectilinear growth.

The eruption of the Laacher See volcano in the Eifel in Germany is one of Central Europe's largest eruptions over the past 100,000 years. Technical advances in combination with tree remains buried in the course of the eruption now enabled an international research team to accurately date the event. Accordingly, the eruption of the Laacher See volcano occurred 13,077 years ago and thus 126 years earlier than previously assumed.