Page 3 - Mit Eaps News Today

MIT scientists tested a pilot application using seismometers to measure and track changes in groundwater aquifers. This method is more cost-effective and can inform policymaking for groundwater management as droughts become more frequent.

MIT researchers find that, early in its history, the moon was highly porous, which was likely a result of early, massive impacts that shattered much of the crust. They reached their conclusions with simulations and data from NASA’s GRAIL mission.

MIT seismologists Camilla Cattania and William Frank have teamed up to study slow slip earthquakes and the complex geometry of fault zones. This collaboration will further our understanding earthquake behavior and using observation, statistics, and modeling to eventually predict earthquake activity.

A new study supports the longstanding idea that if life exists, it might make a home in Venus’ clouds. The study’s authors identified a chemical pathway by which life could neutralize Venus’ acidic environment, creating a self-sustaining, habitable pocket in the clouds.

MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel has used climate modeling, rather than storm records, to reconstruct the history of hurricanes and tropical cyclones around the world. His study finds that North Atlantic hurricanes have indeed increased in frequency over the last 150 years, similar to what historical records have shown.

MIT professor emeritus of planetary physics Gordon Pettengill, a pioneer in radio astronomy, has died at 95. Pettengill helped repurpose military radar technology for science and space exploration and contributed to numerous NASA missions.

Credits: Photo: Kelsy Cain Next image Found in jewelry, car parts, pigments, and industrial chemical reactions, the metal chromium and its compounds are often employed for their color, finish, and anti-corrosive and catalytic properties. Currently, geoscientists and paleoceanographers from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are looking to add another use to that list: as a way to examine chemical shifts in ancient Earth’s oceans and atmos...

Credits: Image: iStockphoto Next image The world’s oceans are a vast repository for gases including ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. They absorb these gases from the atmosphere and draw them down to the deep, where they can remain sequestered for centuries and more. Marine CFCs have long been used as tracers to study ocean currents, but their impact on atmospheric concentrations was assumed to be negligible. Now, MIT researchers have found the oc...

Credits: Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech Caption: Clockwise from top left: Maya Nasr, Michael H Hecht, the Mars2020/Perseverance rover, Ben Weiss and Tanja Bosak. Credits: Image: MIT News. Rover image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech Caption: Technicians in the clean room are carefully lowering the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument into the b...