The American Geological Institute (AGI) and its program partners have announced the theme for this year's Earth Science Week: 'No Child Left Inside'. These events were originally organized to help the public gain a better understanding and appreciation for the Earth Sciences and to encourage stewardship of the Earth...
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Posted Wednesday, June 4, 2008
A statement newly released by the world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists?the American Geophysical Union, or AGU?updates the organization's position on climate change: the evidence for it, potential consequences from it, and how to respond to it. The statement is the first revision since 2003 of the climate-change position of the AGU, which has a membership of 50,000 researchers, teachers, and students in 137 countries...
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Posted Wednesday, February 6, 2008
In recent years, geoscientists have detected 'slow-motion' earthquakes deep beneath Western Washington and British Columbia. These quakes, called episodic tremor-and-slip events, occur about every 14 months, last for two to three weeks and are apparently associated with movement along the Cascadia subduction zone...
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Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007
The first 'State of the Carbon Cycle Report' for North America, released online this week by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, finds the continent's carbon budget increasingly overwhelmed by human-caused emissions. North American sources release nearly 2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, mostly as carbon dioxide...
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Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007
Geoscientists from the University of Texas at Austin and partner institutions have published a report which provides some explanation why earthquakes occurring off the southwest coast of Japan generate especially powerful and dangerous tsunamis, such as the Tonakai tsunami in 1944, which killed about 1200 people...
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Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007
Researchers with the University of Kansas and partner institutions have announced the discovery of a fossil jellyfish in deposits from the Cambrian period (about 505 million years ago), some 200 million years older than previously known occurrences. The fossil, discovered in Utah, consists of a film in fine sediment that resembles a picture of the animal, showing a distinct bell-shape, tentacles, and muscle scars with enough detail to assert that it is related to the modern orders and families of jellyfish...
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Posted Tuesday, November 6, 2007
A team of Chinese and American scientists has discovered a new type of mammal in Jurassic (about 165 million years ago) lake bed deposits in Northern China. The creature, named Pseudotribos robustus, was about 12 centimeters long, weighed 20 to 30 grams, and most likely fed on worms and insects. The fossil has a unique type of dentition (shape and arrangement of teeth) that the researchers believe shows evolutionary convergence with previously known types...
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Posted Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado at Boulder have discovered that large-scale fires in western and southeastern states can pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a few weeks as the states' entire motor vehicle traffic in a year...
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Posted Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have announced that they and their research partners have successfully launched a solar telescope to an altitude of 120,000 feet. The project, known as Sunrise, involved launching an instrument package by balloon from the National Scientific Ballooning Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico...
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Posted Tuesday, October 30, 2007
New research conducted by Nicholas Schmerr and Edward Garnero of Arizona State University suggests that scientists must recast their understanding of the inner workings of Earth from a relatively homogeneous environment to one that is highly dynamic and chemically diverse. Schmerr and Garnero used data from the USArray, which is part of the NSF-funded EarthScope project...
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Posted Tuesday, October 30, 2007
