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Category: Earth Science: Oceans, Geology

A replica of the prototype of the kilogram (Le Grand K) at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris, France. (Japs 88/Wikimedia Commons/Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)

Quantum Mechanics Will Be Used to Determine Weight and Measurement Standards

November 16, 2018

What makes a kilogram a kilogram? Since the late 19th century the standard, which a kilogram has been measured, has been based on a chunk of platinum-alloy, called Le Grand K, that’s held at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures laboratory in Sèvres, France. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a kilogram was originally intended […]

The Battle of Waterloo. Painting by William Sadler (Wikimedia Commons)

Did a Volcanic Eruption Lead to Napoleon’s Defeat at Waterloo?

August 24, 2018

A British scientist thinks a volcanic eruption may have led to Napoleon Bonaparte’s crushing defeat at Waterloo, in what is now Belgium, on June 18, 1815. Historians say heavy rains fell on Napoleon’s troops the night before the big battle, causing the ground to become very muddy and soggy. With these miserable conditions, Napoleon’s artillery […]

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of the sun as it pumped out a powerful X1.8-class flare solar flare on 12/19/14. X-class flares are the biggest and most intense of these solar explosions that blast large amounts of energy, light and high speed particles into space. (NASA)

Space and Earth Weather Align to Make a Bad Situation Worse

August 2, 2018

A new study suggests that an unfortunate confluence of space weather and Earth weather events in early September 2017, may have made a bad situation worse in the wake of devastation left by a line of hurricanes in the Caribbean. As three tropical storms, including the category 5 hurricane Irma, were making their way across a […]

The gorgeous colors of Yellowstone National Park’s Grand Prismatic hot spring are among the park’s many hydrothermal features created by the fact that Yellowstone sits above a supervolcano – the largest type of volcano on Earth. (Robert B. Smith & Lee J. Siegel)

Possible New Power Source of Yellowstone Supervolcano Found

July 30, 2018

According to the US Geological Survey, the Yellowstone supervolcano, located in the Western United States, is known to have had three major eruptions between 640,000 and 2.1 million years ago. It’s been long thought that the volcano was powered by heat from the Earth’s core, like most other volcanoes. But, a new study suggests that […]

This is Ecuador's Tungurahua, or “Throat of Fire”, volcano as it erupts on August 24, 2014. (Reuters)’s another of this week’s active volcanoes. This is Ecuador's Tungurahua, or “Throat of Fire”, volcano as it erupts on August 24, 2014. (Reuters)

Plenty of Advanced Warning for Supervolcano Eruption

May 3, 2018

There have been reports in the media that a couple of supervolcanoes, such as Yellowstone in the US and Taupo in New Zealand, that are saying are on the verge of eruption. The United State Geological Survey (USGS) says, however, that such an eruption at Yellowstone is very unlikely in the next thousand or even 10,000 years. […]

Swarm is ESA’s constellation of Earth observation satellites designed to measure the magnetic signals from Earth’s core, mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere and magnetosphere, providing data that will allow scientists to study the complexities of our protective magnetic field. (© ESA/AOES Medialab)

SWARM Tracks the Ocean’s Magnetic Field

April 17, 2018

Earth’s magnetic fields protect us from deadly radiation from high-energy solar particles and cosmic rays. Most of this protective shield is produced by a vast amount of hot molten iron swirling around in our planet’s outer core. But there’s another little-known contributor to our geomagnetic field. It’s the salty and electrically conductive ocean. When salty ocean […]

Diamond crystal in kimberlite matrix. (James St. John via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0)

Diamonds Provide Evidence of Liquid Water Deep Inside Earth

March 13, 2018

Take a diamond with impurities to a jeweler, and you will probably be told it is worth little or nothing. But some impure diamonds that pushed up to the surface from the Earth’s interior in China, the Republic of South Africa, and Botswana are priceless to a group of scientists, who studied them. The researchers […]

Cosmic rays interacting with the Earth's atmosphere producing ions that helps turn small aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei -- seeds on which liquid water droplets form to make clouds. (illustration - H. Svensmark/DTU)

Cosmic Rays Found to Impact Cloud Formation

February 13, 2018

A recent study from scientists at the Technical University of Denmark provides new evidence that cosmic rays play a role in cloud formation, thus affecting our climate. Cosmic rays are a form of fast-moving, high-energy radiation that emanates from the sun or from sources light years away from our solar system. According to the study, […]

This time-lapse video, assembled from a set of Hubble Space Telescope photos, reveals two asteroids orbiting each other that have comet-like features. The asteroid pair, called 2006 VW139/288P, was observed in September 2016, just before the asteroid made its closest approach to the Sun. (NASA, ESA, and J. DePasquale and Z. Levay (STScI))

60 Days in Bed For Science; Asteroid Belt Mystery Solved & Ice on Mercury?

September 22, 2017

Mystery Asteroid Belt Object Really a Binary Asteroid Back in 2011 a Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or PanSTARRS survey detected an object in the asteroid belt displaying comet-like activity. So along with being labeled an asteroid, when it was discovered five years earlier, scientists also gave it a comet designation. After analyzing […]

Engineer Volkmar Dohmen stands in front of a giant bank of xenon short-arc lamps at the DLR German national aeronautics and space research center in Germany. When switched on, what is being called the world’s largest artificial sun creates combined intensity that's 10,000x stronger than sun's light on Earth's surface and produces temperatures of around 2,982° Celsius. The photo was taken on 3/21/17 (AP)

March 2017 Science Images

March 31, 2017

 

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