Science's top ten: Discovery of genes' 'control switches' named top advance of 2002
...w technology erased the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere on telescopes' view of the heavens in 2002. The result, enabled by the flexing of thin mirrors hundred of times each second, was a suite of space images crisper than any taken before. Telescopes in Hawaii and Chile used this "adaptive optics" technol...Shifts in rice farming practices in China reduce greenhouse gas methane
...e in the rate that methane has entered the Earth's atmosphere over the last 20 years, a NASA-funded study finds....me time, since 1750, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled, though the rate of increase has slowed during the 1980-90s. "There are thre...Antarctic ice seals life's fate
... Earth. The salty water has been isolated from the atmosphere for at least 2,800 years. Ice core samples taken ...ly," said Doran. "Mars is very cold. It has a thin atmosphere now and cannot support liquid water on the surface, although there's evidence that there may be some......oup of phytoplankton for removing carbon from the atmosphere and it's the silicon in diatoms that makes carbon removal possible. This is the first time that that anyone has presented the relationship between carbon and silicon in diatoms. What we've found is that temperature dramatically influences how well di...Climate change surprise: High carbon dioxide levels can retard plant growth, study reveals
...ons by transferring large amounts of carbon in the atmosphere to plants and soils. "Perhaps we won't get as muc...tively pull elevated CO2 concentrations out of the atmosphere and keep the world at the appropriate equilibrium," he added. "But our experiment shows that we can'...Combining global environmental changes yields surprising ecosystem response
...ast hundred years, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by more than 30%. The planet has warmed by about 1 F. Rainfall has increased in some regions and decreased in others. And human actions have more than doubled inputs of biologically available nitrogen. Elevated atmospheric CO2 incre...Revolutionary new theory for origins of life on Earth
...hat chemical reactions in the earth's most ancient atmosphere produced the building blocks of life - in essence - life first, cells second and the atmosphere playing a role. Professor Martin and Dr Russell have long had problems with the existing hypothese...New books show social side of weather and climate
... and reference series is both a basic guide to the atmosphere and a reference for travelers of the active or armchair variety. The book's opening chapters explain the ingredients of weather and climate and examine wild weather--from tornadoes and hurricanes, to floods and drought, to the basics of El Nio and ...GSA release 02-55: Dec. Geology & GSA Today media highlights
...e initial dissociated hydrate methane to reach the atmosphere prior to oxidation. Mineral biosignatures in evaporites: Presence of rosickyite in an endoevaporitic microbial community from Death Valley, California . Susanne Douglas and Heixong Yang, California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory...Photosynthesis analysis shows work of ancient genetic engineering
...ikely reason for the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere that transformed the chemistry of the Earth billions of years ago, further triggering the evolution of complex life. After decades of research, biochemists now understand that this critical biological process depends on some very elaborate and rapid...Six reporters named to receive 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Awards
...ons of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks," Revkin wrote in his expose on burning coal fires. The impact of gaps in climate models on efforts to predict global warming, and the U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 were the focus of...Scripps research gives tiny phytoplankton a large role in Earth's climate system
...on would be able to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and therefore reduce global warming. Frouin and Iacobellis, however, believe their new findings may run counter to those arguments. "We are saying that if you increase the amount of phytoplankton in the ocean, which would probably be a consequence of...Science picksleads, feeds and story seeds (November 2002)
...tland Markets? --Capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and holding it in "sinks" on the landscape is a critical component to dealing with global climate change curbing emissions alone will not bring the natural carbon cycle into better balance. Carbon dioxide emissions are beginning to be traded as com...Fussy microbe holds promise for environmental cleanup
...water, preventing the toxin from escaping into the atmosphere and causing ozone depletion. Finding TCA1 and understanding how to make it thrive is a first step in devising ways to put the bacterium to work cleaning up contaminated sites that until now were left with a piece of the puzzle unsolved....Increasing nitrogen in Earth's soils may signal global changes, say U. of Colorado researchers
...carbon is stored in soils than is being put in the atmosphere in the form of C02, according to biology Assistant... appear in the Oct. 31 issue of Nature. C02 in the atmosphere is believed to have risen by about one-third since the Industrial Revolution began in roughly 1760, ...Oregon power companies offset carbon through investment in Ecuadors rainforest
...ealthy, intact forests store carbon taken from the atmosphere and thus play a unique role in mitigating the harmful effects of climate change. Global deforestation accounts for 20 percent of the annual emission of greenhouse gases. Currently, less than one percent of Ecuador's coastal rainforest remains intac......rbon dioxide as the dominant gas in the greenhouse atmosphere of early Earth by about 2.8 billion years ago. So ... for methane as a significant component of Earth's atmosphere occurred at the same time as analogous evidence for the first cyanobacteria?'" Schwartzman and Cald...Evolution upset: Oxygen-making microbes came last, not first
...his was followed by a sudden rise in oxygen in the atmosphere at about 2.2 or 2.3 billion years ago. "The (traditional) model was that the cyanobacteria were present all the time," says Blank. Reasonable as all this sounds, it doesn't match the genetic evolutionary tree, she says. In Blank's version of the st...Asian dust storm causes plankton to bloom in the North Pacific
...ter, phytoplankton regulates carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus helps regulate global climate. In the 1980s, oceanographer John Martin gathered these facts in his "iron hypothesis," which proposed that by fertilizing plankton growth with iron, global warming could be offset. Iron fertilization can inde...Food for thought: What are the likely side effects of fertilizing phytoplankton with iron?
...s a means to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could result in significant, unwanted side effects...ng. Several ideas for removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere have been proposed, such as sequestering the CO2 in the deep ocean. One technique for accomplishing ...