When the climate warmed relatively quickly about 14,700 years ago, seasonal monsoons moved northward. Prior to that, the monsoons were dropping more rain on the Earth's oceans at the expense of tropical areas, according to climate researchers. In an article to be published in the June 12 issue of the journal Science, researchers from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Oregon State University present their findings after comparing oxygen isotopes in air that was captured in ice cores and previously published data from ancient stalagmites found in caves. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation

A Purdue University study shows that introducing a new hybrid of the American chestnut tree would not only bring back the all-but-extinct species, but also put a dent in the amount of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere.

Almost all of the 300 families in the southwest Afghanistan town of Sya Kamarak, a day's drive along broken roads from the nearest city, live off the land. When the rains failed in April and May 2008, farmers lost most of their wheat harvest - an annual crop down sixty percent from previous years. Three families had already lost children to starvation; the drought threatened to take more. The situation in Sya Kamarak is one of the reasons two new NASA projects are being developed that use satellite data and powerful computer models to help public health officials better anticipate famine and speed up the delivery of food supplies and humanitarian aid to populations in critical need. With the inception of these programs, NASA satellite images are now used to develop a sustainable technique for identifying drought conditions and agricultural failure long before harvest time.

The Abyss is a dark, deep place, but it's no longer hidden. At least when Nereus is on the scene. Nereus is a new type of deep-sea robotic vehicle, called a hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV). Nereus dove to 10,902 meters (6.8 miles) on May 31, 2009, in the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, reports a team of engineers and scientists aboard the research vessel Kilo Moana.

Florida Institute of Technology researchers are trying to solve one of the great mysteries in nature: how thunderstorms make lightning. Because, in principle, lightning is a big spark it should behave like other sparks-like the ones created when we touch a door knob on a dry day. Scientists have accumulated evidence, however, that lightning sometimes behaves in very un-spark-like ways.

There's little doubt that coral reefs the world over face threats on many fronts: pollution, diseases, destructive fishing practices and warming oceans. But reefs appear to be more resistant to one potential menace - seaweed - than previously thought, according to new research by a team of marine scientists from the United States and Australia. Their study is the first global-scale analysis of thousands of surveys of individual reefs - in all, more than 3,500 examinations of about 1,800 reefs performed between 1996 and 2006. The study appears in the June issue of the journal Ecology, which is published by the Ecological Society of America.

Scientists asked people around the world on Monday to help compile an Internet-based observatory of life on earth as a guide to everything from the impact of climate change on wildlife to pests that can damage crops.

Past Earth Science and Climate Change News

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