Earth and Atmospheric Sciences News

The Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany, recently obtained the biggest fleet of so-called gliders in Europe. These instruments can explore the oceans like sailplanes up to a depth of 1000 metres.

The faint tug of the sun and moon on the San Andreas Fault stimulates tremors deep underground, suggesting that the rock 15 miles below is lubricated with highly pressurized water that allows the rock to slip with little effort.

Disaster authorities here gave stubborn villagers, living near the volcano's danger zone, until 12 midnight to move to safer ground or face force evacuation to their designated holding areas as Mt. Mayon's imminent eruption nears.

NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite has captured five complete polar seasons of noctilucent (NLC) or "night-shining" clouds with an unprecedented horizontal resolution of 3 miles by 3 miles.

The analysis of microfossils found in ocean sediment cores is illuminating the environmental conditions that prevailed at high latitudes during a critical period of Earth history.

For most of a decade, scientists have documented unfelt and slow-moving seismic events, called episodic tremor and slip, showing up in regular cycles under the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state and Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

The most detailed seismic images yet published of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano shows a plume of hot and molten rock rising at an angle from the northwest at a depth of at least 410 miles,

The gases which formed the Earth's atmosphere -- and probably its oceans -- did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a study by University of Manchester and University of Houston scientists.

Researchers have found compelling evidence of a previously undocumented large volcanic eruption that occurred exactly 200 years ago, in 1809. The discovery helps explain the record cold decade from 1810-1819.

The rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be fueling more than climate change. It could also be making some trees grow like crazy.