Geophysics Gravity News Today

Pine Island Glaciers ice shelf lost about one-fifth of its total area between 2017 and 2020, in three dramatic collapses. Meanwhile the glacier sped up by 12%. The rest of the ice shelf, the authors say, could disappear much sooner than previous studies had suggested.

The type of material present under glaciers has a big impact on how fast they slide towards the ocean. Scientists face a challenging task to acquire data of this under-ice landscape. Choosing the wrong equations for the under-ice landscape can have the same effect on the predicted contribution to sea-level rise as a warming of several degrees, says Henning Åkesson, who led a new published study on Petermann Glacier in Greenland.

 E-Mail Researchers from Skoltech have designed and conducted experiments measuring gas permeability under various conditions for ice-containing sediments mimicking permafrost. Their results can be useful both in modeling and testing techniques for gas production from Arctic reservoirs and in tracing methane emission in high latitudes. The paper was published in the journal Energy&Fuels. Permafrost, even though it sounds very stable and permanent, is actually quite diverse: depending on the c...

 E-Mail Credit: Irfan Rashid, Department of Geoinformatics, University of Kashmir On February 7 of this year, the Chamoli district in the Uttarakhand region of India experienced a humanitarian tragedy when a veritable wall of rock and ice collapsed and formed a debris flow that barreled down the Ronti Gad, Rishiganga, and Dhauliganga river valleys. The massive slide, caused when a wedge of rock carrying a steep hanging glacier broke off a ridge in the Himalayan mountain range, and the resultin...

What if we could identify at-risk areas anywhere in the world at any time? Enter NASAs Global Landslide Hazard Assessment (LHASA) model and mapping tool.

Seismic waves generated by earthquakes travel through Earths solid iron inner core faster in the direction of the rotation axis than along the equator. UC Berkeley scientists created a core growth model to explain this. To fit seismic data, the model predicts that asymmetric growth of the core leads to crystal movement that preferentially aligns iron-nickel crystals north-south. The model implies that the core is only 0.5-1.5 billion years old, a fraction of Earths age.

Disruptions from sea-level rise and coastal flooding events have significant indirect impacts on urban traffic networks and road safety.

Researchers have developed a new concept to explain the phenomenon known as Green Sahara. They demonstrate that a permanent vegetation cover in the Sahara was only possible under two overlapping rainy seasons. Dr. Enno Schefuß of MARUM - Center for Marine Environmental Sciences of the University of Bremen, Dr. Rachid Cheddadi of the University of Montpellier, and their colleagues have now published their study in the journal PNAS.

The cause of Earths deepest earthquakes has been a mystery to science for more than a century, but a team of Carnegie scientists may have cracked the case. New research published in AGU Advances provides evidence that fluids play a key role in deep-focus earthquakes--which occur between 300 and 700 kilometers below the planets surface.

Researchers hope industry and governments worldwide will use the SSSAFE model to help early warning systems mitigate landslide risks