News by Subject Earth Science

Over the past 22 years, sea levels in the Arctic have risen an average of 2.2 millimeters per year. This is the conclusion of a Danish-German research team after evaluating 1.5 billion radar measurements of various satellites using specially developed algorithms.

Strong volcanic eruptions, especially when a super volcano erupts, will have a strong impact on ozone, and might interrupt the ozone recovery processes.

The discovery of Tamu Massif, a gigantic volcano located about 1,000 miles east of Japan, made big news in 2013 when researchers reported it was the largest single volcano documented on earth, roughly the size of New Mexico. New findings, reported this week in Nature Geoscience, conclude that it is a different breed of volcanic mountain than earlier thought, throwing into doubt the prior claim that it is the world's largest single volcano.

Istanbul is located in close proximity to the North Anatolian fault, a boundary between two major tectonic plates where devastating earthquakes occur frequently. Using an autonomous measuring system on the seafloor, researchers of the GEOMAR, Kiel, together with colleagues from France and Turkey, have now for the first time measured deformation underwater and detected a considerable build-up of tectonic strain below the Marmara Sea near Istanbul.

Instability hidden within Antarctic ice is likely to accelerate its flow into the ocean and push sea level up at a more rapid pace than previously expected. Even if images of vanishing Arctic ice and mountain glaciers are jarring, their potential contributions to sea level rise are nowhere near those of Antarctica, the leviathan of sea level rise.

Wind-driven erosion of minerals on Mars may be the reason why methane disappears so rapidly on the red planet. Saltation causes electrical charges, that can oxidize minerals and ionize gases like methane, making the ionized methane bond to the minerals. That is the explanation proposed by an interdisciplinary research group from Aarhus University, based on laboratory experiments in a Mars-like environment.