Earth
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Earth
Arctic Foulers: Foraging seabirds carry contaminants home
When seabirds go out looking for food, they can bring home traces of pollutants that build up around their nesting colonies.
- Earth
Power-laden winds sweep North America
There's more than enough wind power to satisfy the United States' energy requirements, a new analysis of weather data suggests.
- Earth
Growth Slumps: Melting permafrost shapes Alaskan lakes
A new model suggests that some fast-growing, egg-shaped lakes in Alaska expand when their permafrost banks melt and slump in tiny landslides.
- Earth
Volcanic Hot Spots
Many geophysical studies, including analyses of deep-traveling seismic waves and computer simulations of flowing molten rock deep beneath Earth's crust, are providing evidence that mantle plumes actually exist.
- Earth
Bacteria Ride the Tide: Moon’s phases predict water quality at beaches
At many ocean beaches, full and new moons coincide with the greatest concentrations of bacteria in the water.
- Earth
Antarctica’s gaining ice in some spots
Large portions of Antarctica are storing more snowfall than they once did.
- Earth
Wetland Blanket: Volcanic sulfates may curb methane emission
Field studies hint that the deposition on wetlands of sulfate compounds from the atmosphere could temporarily stifle those regions' natural emissions of methane.
- Earth
Farmers without Fungus: How to store peanuts to reduce toxins
African peanut farmers can more than halve their exposure to a class of harmful fungal toxins called aflatoxins by adopting several simple measures after harvest.
- Earth
Icy Heat: Satellites look at heat flow through Antarctica’s crust
Using satellite observations of Earth's magnetic field, scientists can estimate the amount of heat flowing upward through Earth's surface under kilometers-thick ice.
- Earth
Seismic noise can yield maps of Earth’s crust
The small, random, and nearly constant seismic waves that travel in all directions through Earth's crust can be used to make ultrasoundlike images of geologic features within the crust.
- Earth
. . . and churn up big waves, too
As Hurricane Ivan approached the U.S. Gulf Coast last September, sensors detected the largest wave ever measured by instruments.
- Earth
A hurricane can dump a lot of rain . . .
Hurricanes can drop enormous amounts of precipitation in a short amount of time, a phenomenon that residents of Puerto Rico experienced in spades when Hurricane Georges struck the island in 1998.
