All Posts
2008-08-15 17:05:42
by James Hrynyshyn in Island of Doubt
Earth / Environmental
Jim Hansen wants to see all coal-fired plants shut down by 2030. Except for any plants that employ carbon-capture and sequestration. Al Gore wants to see the United States generate all its electricity from renewable sources by 2018, which means shutting down all the coal-fired plants. Except for any plants that employ carbon-capture and sequestration. Princeton University's Pacala and Socolow of the "wedge" strategy make CCS an integral part of their future clean energy portfolio. Everybody who's crunched the emissions numbers pretty much agrees that coal has got to go. Unless we can captur...more
- TURKENBURG W. (2008) Life cycle assessment of a pulverized coal power plant with post-combustion capture, transport and storage of CO2. International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2008.06.008
2008-08-06 15:02:09
by Chris Rowan in Highly Allochthonous
Earth / Environmental
In my contribution to the recent debate over the relative evilness of volcanoes, I argued:
...life may sometimes be threatened by geology, but it is also intimately shaped by it.
At the time, I did wonder if what is - at least to us geologists - a fairly obvious point was not as fully appreciated by our biologist brethen as it should be. Since making it can apparently get you published in Science, it seems that this is indeed the case. Snark aside, however, Renema et al. have provided a very nice demonstration of how the creation and destruction of habitats by tecto...more
- Pandolfi J. (2008) Hopping Hotspots: Global Shifts in Marine Biodiversity. Science, 321(5889), 654-657. DOI: 10.1126/science.1155674
- He Y. (2007) Climate Change and War Frequency in Eastern China over the Last Millennium. Human Ecology, 35(4), 403-414. DOI: 10.1007/s10745-007-9115-8
2008-07-25 16:04:27
by James Hrynyshyn in Island of Doubt
Earth / Environmental
As if the developing world didn't have a enough to worry about when it comes to joining the industrialized 21st century without following in the developed world's polluting footprints. A new study by British researchers finds that where you fly makes a difference to your impact on the climate. The take-home message is jet flights near the equator do more damage than at high latitudes.
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- Pyle J. A. (2008) Impact of perturbations to nitrogen oxide emissions from global aviation. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113(D11), DOI: 10.1029/2007JD009140
2008-07-14 09:12:22
by Maria in Green Gabbro
Earth / Environmental
There's an article in last Friday's issue of Nature describing some changes in the rocks near the San Andreas Fault that occurred in the hours before two small earthquakes. Here's the BBC's writeup; for those of you who can sneak behind the Nature paywall, the original article is here.
A similar study was published sixteen years ago, not in Nature but in Science. The first author on the 1992 Science paper, Paul Silver, was also the second author on this week's Nature paper. While the recent study measured stress changes along a fault using precise instrumentation installed in a pai...more
- Valette-Silver N. J. (1992) Detection of Hydrothermal Precursors to Large Northern California Earthquakes. Science, 257(5075), 1363-1368. DOI: 10.1126/science.257.5075.1363
- He Y. (2007) Climate Change and War Frequency in Eastern China over the Last Millennium. Human Ecology, 35(4), 403-414. DOI: 10.1007/s10745-007-9115-8
2008-07-11 13:08:12
by James Hrynyshyn in Island of Doubt
Earth / Environmental
If you had to identify the most popularly cited threats posed by a changing climate, rising sea levels would be a strong contender. While no one would argue that the fate of hundreds of millions of humans who live in low-lying coastal regions is not a good enough reason to put the brakes on global warming, I'd like to see more attention paid to what's happening beneath the ocean surface at its current level. I'm talking about the possibility of mass coral extinction. It's the subject of a new analysis in Science by an impressive list of 39 scientists from an even more impressive list of res...more
- Wood E. (2008) One-Third of Reef-Building Corals Face Elevated Extinction Risk from Climate Change and Local Impacts. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1159196
2008-07-05 20:08:08
by zs in Hindered Settling
Earth / Environmental
I have pledged a while ago not to blog about Peyto Lake anymore, but I have recently discovered some beautiful GPR profiles that I have to share to make the story more complete.
Derald G. Smith of the University of Calgary and Harry M. Jol of the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire have looked at the internal structure of the Peyto Lake delta using a technology called ground-penetrating radar (GPR). The principles used in GPR data acquisition are similar to those of reflection seismology, but electromagnetic waves are used instead of acoustic energy, and reflections occur at ...more
- JOL H. (1997) Radar structure of a Gilbert-type delta, Peyto Lake, Banff National Park, Canada. Sedimentary Geology, 113(3-4), 195-209. DOI: 10.1016/S0037-0738(97)00061-4
2008-06-21 19:05:31
by James Hrynyshyn in Island of Doubt
Earth / Environmental
Sixty years is a blink of the metaphorical eye on geological time scales, and it's still damn fast when you're talking about climate change. While it may be far too long for Wall Street to worry about, six decades is safely with human lifespans, and a study that concludes temperatures in Greenland can shift by 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10°C) in such a short time merits more than a passing mention.
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- White J. W. (2008) High-Resolution Greenland Ice Core Data Show Abrupt Climate Change Happens in Few Years. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1157707
2008-06-13 01:05:34
by Maria in Green Gabbro
Earth / Environmental
It's been two years* since the ground opened near Sidoarjo, Indonesia, spewing mud over the homes, farms, and businesses of tens of thousands of people. The disaster quickly acquired the rather endearing name of "Lusi", which is short for "lumpur" (Indonesian for mud) and "Sidoarjo". The two-year anniversary media bonanza has focused on the continuing plight of the refugees and the publication of a new paper analyzing GPS data around the mud volcano to determine that there is, indeed, going to be a big hole in the ground where the mud used to be. Chris Rowan has already blogged about that ...more
- TINGAY M. (2008) The East Java Mud Volcano (2006 to Present): An Earthquake or Drilling Trigger?. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2008.05.029
2008-06-06 04:00:36
by Alessia Maggi in Sismordia - Seismology at Concordia
Earth / Environmental
Glacial earthquakes have been one of the hot topics in seismology over the past few years. As they slide past asperities in the bedrock, certain glaciers emit long period seismic waves that can be detected by relatively distant seismic stations. These slip events are what we call glacial earthquakes.
Wiens et al. (2008) have recently published in Nature Geoscience a set of beautiful observations of this phenomenon. They have put together information from regional seismic observations and a local GPS survey to constrain the nucleation, slip velocity and duration of glacial earthq...more
- King M. A. (2008) Simultaneous teleseismic and geodetic observations of the stick–slip motion of an Antarctic ice stream. Nature, 453(7196), 770-774. DOI: 10.1038/nature06990
2008-06-05 12:14:26
by James Hrynyshyn in Island of Doubt
Earth / Environmental
Given just how much we don't understand about the Earth's climate, it's understandable that a newcomer to the science of global warming would doubt that we are capable of predicting much of anything. Many a climate change pseudoskeptic makes this argument, which can be compelling, but only if you don't understand how science works. A paper in this week's Nature Geoscienceis a perfect example of why so many people who otherwise consider themselves skeptics, people like me, find the anthropogenic explanation for climate change so persuasive. It's not so much what we know as the trends associa...more
- Sherwood S. C. (2008) Warming maximum in the tropical upper troposphere deduced from thermal winds. Nature Geoscience, 1(6), 399-403. DOI: 10.1038/ngeo208
- He Y. (2007) Climate Change and War Frequency in Eastern China over the Last Millennium. Human Ecology, 35(4), 403-414. DOI: 10.1007/s10745-007-9115-8