News by Subject Earth Science

An international team of researchers has found that the bedrock below the remote West Antarctic Ice Sheet is rising much more rapidly than previously thought, in response to ongoing ice melt.

The earth is rising in one part of Antarctica at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, as ice rapidly disappears and weight is lifted off the bedrock, a new international study has found. The findings have surprising and positive implications for the survival of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which scientists had previously thought could be doomed because of the effects of climate change.

he Himalayan Range includes some of the youngest and most spectacular mountains on Earth, but the rugged landscape that lends it the striking beauty for which it is known can also keep scientists from fully understanding how these mountains formed. 'We know more about the rocks on parts of Mars than we do about some of the areas in the Himalaya,' said Dr. Alka Tripathy-Lang.

Scientists at Rice University, the University of the Virgin Islands and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration combine efforts to quantify how barnacles infest stony coral over a variety of conditions and reduce calcium carbonate on reefs. Coral reefs harbor diverse marine life and help prevent coastal erosion.

Stone tools found with a 5,300-year-old frozen mummy from Northern Italy reveal how alpine Copper Age communities lived, according to a study published June 20, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ursula Wierer from the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Florence, Italy, and colleagues.

Many researchers hypothesize that the southern tip of the 1300-km-long San Andreas fault zone (SAFZ) could be the nucleation site of the next major earthquake on the fault, yet geoscientists cannot evaluate this hazard until the location and geometry of the fault zone is documented.

University of Kansas researchers discovered friction -- or 'basal drag' -- between ice sheets and the hard bed underneath has no influence on how fast glaciers flow.

A discovery of a new species of sponge-like fossil from the Cambrian Period sheds light on early animal evolution.

Palm oil has become part of our daily lives, but a recent study by EPFL and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) serves as a reminder that intensive farming of this crop has a major impact on the environment. Both short- and long-term solutions exist, however. The article, which was published on June 19 in Nature Communications, analyzed the carbon costs and benefits of converting rainforests into oil palm plantations.