All posts tagged "Earthsciences"

A critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents may be approaching collapse, which scientists warn will have a dangerous impact on our global climate. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which “effectively transports heat and salt through the global ocean,” has recently shown signs of trending toward a crucial “tipping point” according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. Scientists have been warning of the potential collapse for decades, as the currents’ strength has been weakened by rising temperatures which affect the system’s balance of heat and sal......

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced it was laying off 530 on staff or about 8% of its workforce on Tuesday after expected congressional budget cuts kneecapped one of its biggest endeavors, the Mars Sample Return mission. The Pasadena, California, institution is one of NASA’s major science mission hubs, the home to the majority of Mars missions, including the Perseverance rover currently collecting soil and rock samples as part of that mission. JPL Director Laurie Leshin said fiscal wrangling in Washington has led to an expected budget for that mission of only $300 million, less than a t......

Eleven candidates are on the March 5 primary ballot in California’s 20th Congressional District, previously held by retired Rep. Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, left Congress in December after being ousted as Speaker of the House of Representatives in October. In addition to the March 5 primary for a full two-year term to start in Jan. 2025, there is a separate election with a March 19 primary to finish the remainder of McCarthy’s term. Some of the same candidates are running in both, but this page focuses just on candidates for the March 5 primary. California’s 20th, a solidly-red di......

MIAMI — South Florida awoke Thursday to downed trees, roads closed due to debris and flooding, homes taking on water and massive puddles everywhere. Tens of thousands of homes were without power. The cause? A no-name storm, one that swept the region over two days and dumped up to 14 inches of rain in some spots, with gusts as high as 75 mph at Government Cut and Port Everglades. The damage was enough to rival some tropical storms that have swept the region in recent years, according to the National Hurricane Center. And it even showed a broad area of circulation on radar as it rolled past Sout......

While Atlantis — a fabled continent said to have been swallowed by the sea — continues to elude its seekers, another long-lost and less famous land mass has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean. The splintered remnants of Argoland, a 155 million-year-old continent that once stretched as wide as the United States, were recently located throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. “Finding Argoland proved challenging,” geologists wrote in a pre-print study posted Oct. 19 in the journal Gondwana Research. “We spent seven years putting the puzzle together,” Eldert Advokaat, one of the stu......

MIAMI -- The nation’s military has been working on a new weapon: Creating a "perfect," self-healing coral reef that can withstand disease, warming temperatures and sea rise. Many U.S. military bases along the coasts are feeling the effects of climate change, and their current methods of defense — like sea walls — aren’t working against flooding and erosion. A reef would break up waves before they crash against the base. So for the past 14 months, the Department of Defense has been working with three international teams of scientists, including from the University of Miami, to build a hybrid re......