Category: Earth Science Education
Formaldehyde has many industrial uses–in particle board, plywood, carpet, and adhesives, to name just a few. Formaldehyde is toxic to life–the reason that it’s used as a disinfectant–and the reason that many countries have banned the use of formaldehyde in furniture and housing materials and promote the styles you can find in Archute catalog. But […]
Nearly every day, newspapers report on new scientific breakthroughs. Scientists provide measures of their uncertainty in the results, expressed as a p-value. The p-value is a statistical measure of the randomness of the results; a lower p-value indicates that the reported result is not likely due to chance. In scientific studies, a p-value of 0.05 […]
Glaciers form when millions of layers of snow compact themselves into ice. Scientists take samples from glaciers and are able to determine what happened thousands of years ago, just by examining the ice rings. (See the image of an ice core, below, from Wikimedia Commons.) 19 cm long section of GISP 2 ice core from […]
A new study from the University of Colorado suggests that 66% of Earth’s permafrost could disappear by the year 2200. And this could be really bad for Earth’s temperature. If the temperature increases, the permafrost melts. Simple enough, right? But it’s slightly more complicated. Trapped in the permafrost is lots and lots of carbon–in the […]
A new study from the University of Washington suggests that Earth’s temperature will keep increasing, even if all greenhouse gas emissions were stopped right now. Why? Because greenhouse gases will last longer in the atmosphere than particulate matter (aerosols) that reflect the sun’s light. So, the solar radiation coming in will increase and the heat […]
“Within the next 6 to 12 months, I suspect we’ll be able to detect and verify and announce planets that at least have the size of our own Earth.” –Dr. Geoffrey Marcy, University of California Berkeley “This changes our understanding of our role in the universe. We, in some sense, are not alone in terms […]
It seems counter-intuitive, but it seems that warmer summers actually slow the flow of Greenland’s ice sheets. A new study, published yesterday in Nature, explains how increased melting in warmer years causes the internal drainage system of the ice sheet to change, slowing the glacier’s flow towards the ocean. Normally, the melt-water finds its way […]
Warm millennium, that is. And Southern Hemisphere, that is. New research suggests that Earth will continue to warm into the year 3000, even if human-caused carbon dioxide emissions stop right now. According to their models, scientists predict that the Northern Hemisphere will fare much better, with the warming trend reversing within the millennium. This is […]
NASA scientists have deduced that the newly-discovered planet Kepler-10b is 4.6 times more massive than Earth with an average density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter, about the same density as bronze. How did they learn this from a telescope that detects light changes? (See earlier post about Kepler-10b’s discovery.) It turns out that knowing […]
On January 10, 2011, NASA confirmed that the Kepler space telescope had found its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Kepler-10b is really small, the smallest planet yet discovered outside of our solar system, at 1.4 times the size of Earth. The discovery of Kepler-10b was made possible by some major advances in technology: the ability […]