Page 6 - Geophysical Sciences News Today

Credit: Sunyoung Park It seems like a smooth slab of stainless steel, but look a little closer, and youll see a simplified cross-section of the Los Angeles sedimentary basin. Caltech researcher Sunyoung Park and her colleagues are printing 3D models like the metal Los Angeles proxy to provide a novel platform for seismic experiments. By printing a model that replicates a basins edge or the rise and fall of a topographic feature and directing laser light at it, Park can simulate and record how s...

Analysis by UChicago scientists reverses earlier findings, suggests large temperature swings A new analysis of ceramic chips embedded in meteorites suggests the formation of our solar system was not as quiet and orderly as we once thought. A new study from University of Chicago scientists builds evidence that the baby solar system likely witnessed wild temperature swings and changing conditions—contradicting the decades-old theory that the solar system had gradually and st...

Abu Dhabi: Researchers in Abu Dhabi have unravelled a more than 40-year-old scientific mystery about why a body of unfrozen ocean has appeared within a thick body of ice during Antarctica’s winter. Known as a polynya event, this creation of the water bodies within ocean ice has occurred twice in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica — once in 1973 and again in 2017. Scientists at Khalifa University’s Environmental and Geophysical Sciences (ENGEOS) lab have discovered that synoptic-scale atmospher...

The last million years of Earth history have been characterized by frequent “glacial-interglacial cycles,” large swings in climate that are linked to the growing and shrinking of massive, continent-spanning ice sheets. These cycles are triggered by subtle oscillations in Earth’s orbit and rotation, but the orbital oscillations are too subtle to explain the large changes in climate. “The cause of the ice ages is one of the great unsolved problems in the geosciences,” said Daniel Sigman...

 E-Mail IMAGE: Since the discovery that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were lower during past ice ages, the cause has been a mystery. Now, Princeton geoscientists Danny Sigman and Ellen Ai (seen... view more  Credit: Laura Pedrick The last million years of Earth history have been characterized by frequent "glacial-interglacial cycles," large swings in climate that are linked to the growing and shrinking of massive, continent-spanning ice sheets. These cycles are trigg...