News by Subject Earth Science

New, detailed study of the Renland Ice Cap offers the possibility of modelling other smaller ice caps and glaciers with much greater accuracy than hitherto. The study combined airborne radar data to determine the thickness of the ice cap with on-site measurements of the thickness of the ice cap and satellite data. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute - University of Copenhagen gathered data from the ice cap in 2015, and this work has now come to fruition: More exact predictions of local climate conditions.

A new paper published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies presents the results of and images from the resuming of the archaeological seasons in the Mons Smaragdus region in the Egyptian Eastern Desert. During the 1990s a team from the "Berenike Project" started to survey the area and conducted the first excavations, focusing on the main site identified, Sikait, where the archaeological seasons resumed in January of 2018 and January 2020.

Researchers from the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern, Switzerland, reconstructed for the first mean ocean temperatures over the last 700,000 years using ice core data. The new knowledge serves to improve our understanding of the climate system.

A new method was developed for high-resolution detection of landslides based on seismic data. This method was applied to detect landslides that occurred during the transit of Typhoon Talas across western Japan in 2011. Multiple landslides were detected and located, including one in Shizuoka Prefecture, 400 km east of the typhoon's track. The results show that large and small landslides may follow the same scaling relationships. This method may help develop landslide emergency alert technology.

Throughout the last ice age, the climate changed repeatedly and rapidly during so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, where Greenland temperatures rose between 5 and 16 degrees Celsius in decades. When certain parts of the climate system changed, other parts of the climate system followed like a series of dominos toppling in succession. Today, sea-ice extent is being rapidly reduced, and it is uncertain whether this part of the climate system can trigger sudden future climate change.

Every year, our planet encounters dust from comets and asteroids. These interplanetary dust particles pass through our atmosphere and give rise to shooting stars. Some of them reach the ground in the form of micrometeorites. An international program conducted for nearly 20 has determined that 5,200 tons per year of these micrometeorites reach the ground.

A group of researchers led by Aaron Bufe and Niels Hovius of GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences has taken advantage of different erosion rates and investigated how uplift and erosion of rocks determine the balance of carbon emissions and uptake. The surprising result: at high erosion rates, weathering processes release carbon dioxide; at low erosion rates, they sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

The 15-million-year-old Nördlinger Ries is an asteroid impact crater filled with lake sediments. A research team led by the Göttingen University has now discovered a volcanic ash layer in the crater. In addition, they show that the ground under the crater is sinking in the long-term, which provides important insights about craters on Mars, such as those currently being explored by the NASA Curiosity and Perseverance Rovers. Results were in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets.

The properties of the magma inside a volcano affect how an eruption will play out. In particular, the viscosity of this molten rock is a major factor in influencing how hazardous an eruption could be for nearby communities. But it usually only quantified well after an eruption. New work identifies an indicator of magma viscosity that can be measured before an eruption. This could help scientists and emergency managers understand possible patterns of future eruptions.