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Categories: Geoscience: Severe Weather, Space: Astrophysics

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Las Vegas, with its rapid urbanization and desert landscape, is highly vulnerable to flooding. For this reason, flood managers have built an extensive system of drainage ditches and detention basins to protect the public. Now, a new study shows how intentional engineering and urban development are interacting with climate change to alter the timing and intensity of flood risk.

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Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects -- arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera.

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Our solar system is estimated to be about 4.57 billion years old. Previous analyses of ancient meteorites have shown that minerals were created through chemical reactions with water as far back as 4.5 billion years ago. New findings from the Ryugu asteroid samples indicate that carbonates were forming from water-rock reactions several million years earlier, even closer to the solar system's beginnings.

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Researchers have devised a better way to measure how fast sediment flows in rivers -- information that can help scientists and planners better prepare for flooding and weather-related events, understand salmon activity and even restore rivers.

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Recent research shows that magnetic fields can spontaneously emerge in a plasma if the plasma has a temperature anisotropy. This mechanism is known as the Weibel instability. This new research is the first to unambiguously observe the Weibel instability in the laboratory. It offers a possible solution to the problem of the origin of the microgauss-level magnetic fields that permeate the galaxies.

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Tropical forests are crucial for sucking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But they're also subject to intense storms that can cause 'windthrow' -- the uprooting or breaking of trees. A new study finds that more extreme thunderstorms from climate change will likely cause a greater number of large windthrow events in the Amazon, which could impact the rainforest's ability to serve as a carbon sink.

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Hundreds of millions of light-years away in a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a supermassive black hole is being violently ripped apart under the black hole's immense gravitational pull. As the star is shredded, its remnants are transformed into a stream of debris that rains back down onto the black hole to form a very hot, very bright disk of material swirling around the black hole, called an accretion disc. This phenomenon -- where a star is destroyed by a supermassive black hole and fuels a luminous accretion flare -- is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), and it is predicted that TDEs occur roughly once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a given galaxy.

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Disturbances to Earth's magnetic field can lead birds astray -- a phenomenon scientists call 'vagrancy' -- even in perfect weather, and especially during fall migration. While other factors such as weather likely play bigger roles in causing vagrancy, researchers found a strong correlation between birds that were captured far outside of their expected range and the geomagnetic disturbances that occurred during both fall and spring migrations.

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Understanding how dust grains form in interstellar gas could offer significant insights to astronomers and help materials scientists develop useful nanoparticles.

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Earth's average surface temperature in 2022 tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest on record, according to an analysis by NASA. Continuing the planet's long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2022 were 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.89 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA's baseline period (1951-1980), scientists report.

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A team has studied the relation between galaxy size and luminosity of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

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Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole's gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation. Astronomers have recorded a star's final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole.

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A new theory could explain the origin and properties of systems of rocky super-Earths and their relationship with the terrestrial planets of the solar system.

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Combining satellite technology with machine learning may allow scientists to better track and prepare for climate-induced natural hazards, according to new research.

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Something is amiss in the Butterfly Nebula. When astronomers compared two exposures of this planetary nebula that had been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009 and 2020, they saw dramatic changes in the material within its 'wings.' Powerful winds are apparently driving complex alterations of material within the Butterfly Nebula, behavior not seen in planetary nebulae to date. The researchers want to understand how such activity is possible from what should be a 'sputtering, largely moribund star with no remaining fuel.'

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Vital winter ice road infrastructure may be cracking and sinking under the load of an unseasonably warm start to the new year across Europe and North America. New research warns that ice roads, essential for moving people, food, medicine and fuel in remote northern communities, as well as heavy machinery used by industry, may become unsustainable as the climate warms. This poses significant issues this century.

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Despite recent, torrential rains, most of Southern California remains in a drought. Accordingly, many residents plant trees prized for drought tolerance, but a new study shows that these trees lose this tolerance once they're watered.

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Wheat containing exotic DNA from wild relatives benefits from up to 50 per cent higher yields in hot weather compared with elite lines lacking these genes.

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The severity of marine heatwaves (MHWs) that are increasingly impacting ocean ecosystems, including vulnerable coral reefs, has primarily been assessed using remotely sensed sea-surface temperatures (SSTs), without information relevant to heating across ecosystem depths. Here, using a rare combination of SST, high-resolution in-situ temperatures, and sea level anomalies observed over 15 years near Moorea, French Polynesia, we document subsurface MHWs that have been paradoxical in comparison to SST metrics and associated with unexpected coral bleaching across depths. Variations in the depth range and severity of MHWs was driven by mesoscale (10s to 100s of km) eddies that altered sea levels and thermocline depths and decreased (2007, 2017 and 2019) or increased (2012, 2015, 2016) internal-wave cooling.

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Researchers examine the role of spring heatwaves on the melting rates of mountain snowpacks across the West. They found that in April 2021, record-breaking snowmelt rates occurred at 24% of all mountain snowpack monitoring sites in the region, further compounding the impacts of extended drought conditions.