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An international team of scientists, including UConn Department of Earth Sciences researchers Professor and Department Head Tracy Frank and Professor Christopher Fielding, are working to understand the cause and how the events of the LPME unfolded by focusing on mercury from Siberian volcanoes that ended up in sediments in Australia and South Africa. The research …

Mercury helps to detail Earth’s most massive extinction event Read More »

They found that around half the Earth’s inventory of the volatile element zinc came from asteroids originating in the outer Solar System — the part beyond the asteroid belt that includes the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. This material is also expected to have supplied other important volatiles such as water. Volatiles are elements or …

Meteorites reveal likely origin of Earth’s volatile chemicals Read More »

The beginning of this tense situation is documented in a publication by Eva Boergens in Geophysical Research Letters from the year 2020. In it, she noted that there was a striking water shortage in Central Europe during the summer months of 2018 and 2019. Since then, there has been no significant rise in groundwater levels; …

Satellite data shows sustained severe drought in Europe Read More »

The peer-reviewed findings, published in the journal Environmental Health, show that just two hours of exposure to diesel exhaust causes a decrease in the brain’s functional connectivity — a measure of how The study provides the first evidence in humans, from a controlled experiment, of altered brain network connectivity induced by air pollution. “For many …

Traffic pollution impairs brain function Read More »

Assistant professor of biology at Saint Louis University and senior author on the paper Stephen Blake, Ph.D., has spent much of his career dedicated to studying elephants. In the current paper, Blake, lead author Fabio Berzaghi from the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE), France, and colleagues document exactly how the ecology of megaherbivores …

Can elephants save the planet? Read More »

Snaring CO2 before it floats into the atmosphere is a key component in slowing global warming. Creating incentives for the largest emitters to adopt carbon capture technology, however, is an important precursor. The high cost of commercial capture technology is a longstanding barrier to its widespread use. PNNL scientists believe methanol can provide that incentive. …

Scientists unveil least costly carbon capture system to date Read More »

The study, published January 15 in Global Change Biology, is based on eight years of data on humpback whale pregnancies (2013 to 2020) in waters along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where krill fishing is concentrated. Krill availability in the year before a humpback pregnancy is crucial because females need to increase their energy stores to …

Study reveals influence of krill availability on humpback whale pregnancies Read More »

Nature reserves, Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), Special Areas of Conservation and other forms of protected habitat have long been regarded as a key tool in conservation efforts to preserve and restore natural habitats. But the new study, which collated nearly one million records for more than 1,230 invertebrate species between 1990 and 2018, …

More effective protected areas needed to halt biodiversity loss Read More »

Special plastic Goudriaan had a special plastic manufactured especially for these experiments with a distinct form of carbon (13C) in it. When she fed that plastic to bacteria after pretreatment with “sunlight” — a UV lamp — in a bottle of simulated seawater, she saw that special version of carbon appear as CO2 above the …

Bacteria really eat plastic Read More »