Showing 20 articles starting at article 2521

< Previous 20 articles        Next 20 articles >

Categories: Geoscience: Environmental Issues, Geoscience: Landslides

Return to the site home page

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the largest marine oil spill in United States history. The disaster was caused by an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, taking 11 lives and releasing nearly 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Twelve years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, scientists are still working to understand where all this oil ended up, a concept known as environmental fate.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

An international effort to measure air quality in South Korea, a region with complex sources of pollution, may provide new insights into the atmospheric chemistry that produces ozone pollution, according to a team of scientists.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Field surveys conducted in the days after the 7 January 2020 Puerto Rico earthquake documented more than 300 landslides and severe liquefaction in southern coastal regions, according to a new study.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists applied their flash Joule heating process to coal fly ash and other toxic waste to safely extract rare earth elements essential to modern electronics and green technologies.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

When did the Earth reach oxygen levels sufficient to support animal life? Researchers have discovered that a rise in oxygen levels occurred in step with the evolution and expansion of complex, eukaryotic ecosystems. Their findings represent the strongest evidence to date that extremely low oxygen levels exerted an important limitation on evolution for billions of years.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Climate change could result in the financial toll of flooding rising by more than a quarter in the United States by 2050 -- and disadvantaged communities will bear the biggest brunt, according to new research.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research looks to improve prediction of brief but intense rainstorms that can cause devastating flash floods and landslides. Intense rain associated with narrow cold-frontal rainbands may last only a few minutes at a particular location, yet the rain can cause catastrophic flash flooding, debris flows and landslides, and can occur along with tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

The dramatic collapse of Indonesia's Anak Krakatau volcano in December 2018 resulted from long-term destabilising processes, and was not triggered by any distinct changes in the magmatic system that could have been detected by current monitoring techniques, new research has found.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

As Earth's ozone layer recovers from past emissions of now-banned CFCs and halons, other chemicals are emerging as major causes of stratospheric ozone depletion. Atmospheric scientists have been searching for the sources of about one-third of the major threats, methyl bromide and methyl chloride. New research shows that copper-based compounds in common use generate these compounds when interacting with soil and seawater, with sunlight boosting production by a factor of 10.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Large wildfires and severe heat events are happening more often at the same time, worsening air pollution across the western United States, a study has found. In 2020, more than 68% of the western U.S. -- representing about 43 million people -- were affected in one day by the resulting harmful-levels of air pollution, the highest number in 20 years. The study found that these concurrent air pollution events are increasing not only in frequency but duration and geographic extent across the region. They have become so bad that they have reversed many gains of the Clean Air Act. The conditions that create these episodes are also expected to continue to increase, along with their threats to human health.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Nearly 2 million new cases of pediatric asthma every year may be caused by a traffic-related air pollutant, a problem particularly important in big cities around the world, according to a new study.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

During long portions of the past 2.4 billion years, the Earth may have been more 'inhospitable' to life than scientists previously thought, according to new computer simulations. Using a state-of-the-art climate model, researchers now believe the level of ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching the Earth's surface could have been underestimated, with UV levels being up to ten times higher.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

When winds loft fine desert dust high into the atmosphere, iodine in that dust can trigger chemical reactions that destroy some air pollution, but also let greenhouse gases stick around longer. The finding may force researchers to re-evaluate how particles from land can impact the chemistry of the atmosphere.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Microorganisms can convert oil into natural gas, i.e. methane. Until recently, it was thought that this conversion was only possible through the cooperation of different organisms. In 2019, a researcher suggested that a special archaeon can do this all by itself, as indicated by their genome analyses. Now, researchers have succeeded in cultivating this 'miracle microbe' in the laboratory. This enabled them to describe exactly how the microbe achieves the transformation. They also discovered that it prefers to eat rather bulky chunks of food.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

An unprecedented drought experiment at Biosphere 2 highlights nature's surprising resilience.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research has discovered that emissions coming from China of the ozone-destroying chemical, dichloromethane, have more than doubled over the last decade.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists have developed a new simple, inexpensive and fast method to detect and measure very low concentrations of agricultural lime in soils, which is generally a time consuming and difficult exercise.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research examining whether forests can mitigate flood risk suggests they may offer less protection against major events than had been hoped. Although the work, which was carried out in forest sites in Ireland and the UK, showed forests can suppress small storm flows it also underlined that they are likely to make minimal difference in reducing the devastating impacts of major flood events.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research examines the chemistry of a proposal to curb climate change's effects -- creating a sunshade in the upper atmosphere made of sulfuric acid -- and finds that there's more work to do to successfully pull off such a feat.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Understanding how climate change will affect the flooding of rivers may become easier with a new framework for assessing flood risk that's been developed by an interdisciplinary team.