Showing 20 articles starting at article 2281

< Previous 20 articles        Next 20 articles >

Categories: Geoscience: Environmental Issues, Geoscience: Landslides

Return to the site home page

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Slipping and sliding on snowy or icy roads is dangerous. Salt and sand help melt ice or provide traction, but excessive use is bad for the environment. And sometimes, a surprise storm can blow through before these materials can be applied. Now, researchers ave filled microcapsules with a chloride-free salt mixture that's added into asphalt before roads are paved, providing long-term snow melting capabilities in a real-world test.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists create carbon nanotubes and other hybrid nanomaterials out of plastic waste using an energy-efficient, low-cost, low-emissions process that could also be profitable.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Natural gas furnaces not only heat your home, they also produce a lot of pollution. Even modern high-efficiency condensing furnaces produce significant amounts of corrosive acidic condensation and unhealthy levels of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and methane. These emissions are typically vented into the atmosphere and end up polluting our soil, water and air. Scientists have developed an affordable add-on technology that removes more than 99.9% of acidic gases and other emissions to produce an ultraclean natural gas furnace. This acidic gas reduction, or AGR, technology can also be added to other natural gas-driven equipment such as water heaters, commercial boilers and industrial furnaces.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Most land-based mammals in the Brazilian Amazon are threatened by climate change and the savannization of the region.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A review article addresses a conflict between models and evidence, known as the Holocene global temperature conundrum.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

'Forever chemicals' are everywhere -- water, soil, crops, animals, the blood of 97% of Americans -- researchers are trying to figure out how they got there. Their recent findings suggest that the microbes that help break down biodegradable materials and other waste are likely complicit in the release of the notorious per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) into the environment.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater, in a critical step towards a truly viable green hydrogen industry. The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen -- skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have summarized the threats that future rocket launches would pose to Earth's protective ozone layer.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have developed a machine learning-based ensemble approach to quantify fire-induced thaw settlement across the entire Tanana Flats in Alaska, which encompasses more than 3 million acres. They linked airborne repeat lidar data to time-series Landsat products (satellite images) to delineate thaw settlement patterns across six large fires that have occurred since 2000. The six fires resulted in a loss of nearly 99,000 acres of evergreen forest from 2000 to 2014 among nearly 155,000 acres of fire-influenced forests with varying degrees of burn severity. This novel approach helped to explain about 65 percent of the variance in lidar-detected elevation change.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A study shows that an irreversible loss of the ice sheets, and a corresponding acceleration of sea level rise, may be imminent if global temperature cannot be stabilized below 1.8 degrees Celsius.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Soil is the Earth's second-biggest carbon storage locker after the ocean, and a research collaboration has shown that it's moisture, not temperature or mineral content, that's the key to how well the soil carbon warehouse works.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Communities of microbes that work together release more carbon dioxide than competitive communities, contributing more to climate change.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research proposes a funding model for a major rehabilitation of the 27 locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi. It relies on a collective investment from all -- or at least most -- of the shippers, along with government funding. The researcher's model shows the public-private partnership would pay off in the long run.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

There is currently less sea ice in the Antarctic than at any time in the forty years since the beginning of satellite observation: in early February 2023, only 2.20 million square kilometers of the Southern Ocean were covered with sea ice.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Existing data are too biased to provide a reliable picture of the global average of local species richness trends.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Humans are artificially expanding cities' coastlines by extending industrial ports and creating luxury residential waterfronts. Developers have added over 2,350 square kilometers of land (900 square miles, or about 40 Manhattans) to coastlines in major cities since 2000, according to a new study. The study reports the first global assessment of coastal land reclamation, which is the process of building new land or filling in coastal water bodies, including wetlands, to expand a coastline. The researchers used satellite imagery to analyze land changes in 135 cities with populations of at least 1 million, 106 of which have done some coastline expansion.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists have been using powerful computer models combined with laboratory experiments to study how a kind of clay can soak up carbon dioxide and store it.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Ongoing climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions is often discussed in terms of global average warming. For example, the landmark Paris Agreement seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, relative to pre-industrial levels. However, the extent of future warming will not be the same throughout the planet. One of the clearest regional differences in climate change is the faster warming over land than sea. This 'terrestrial amplification' of future warming has real-world implications for understanding and dealing with climate change.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

In a new analysis involving adolescents living in London, exposure to higher levels of the pollutant nitrogen dioxide was associated with lower systolic blood pressure, while exposure to higher levels of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) was associated with higher systolic blood pressure.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Acesulfame is a sweetener in sugar-free drinks and foods. As it cannot be metabolized in the human body, the sweetener ends up in wastewater after consumption and remains largely intact even in sewage treatment plants. A new study shows that the persistence of the sweetener varies with temperature as the concentration of the sweetener in wastewater varies with the seasons. The environmental geosciences team analyzed how groundwater flows can be traced based on these seasonal fluctuations. Since residues of the sweetener end up in drinking water, acesulfame serves as an indicator of the origin and composition of our drinking water.