Hard corals may need a dose of vitamin C when building their stony skeletons. New research finds that when free-floating coral larvae settle down and calcify their skeletons, genes associated with the transport of vitamin C get busy. Without enough of the vitamin, corals might even get scurvy.
Lingering oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill could hasten the destruction of historical shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. Tracking the activities of metal-corroding microbes, researchers found that oil mixed into seawater roughly doubled the amount of observed metal corrosion. The scientists reported their findings February 22 at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
Sea levels rose faster last century than during any time since Rome was founded around 2,800 years ago. Reconstructing past rises and falls in global sea level, researchers estimate that more than half of the 13.8 centimeters of sea level rise recorded in the 1900s resulted from global warming effects, such as glacial melt. The new work will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
If you need to detect earthquakes, there’s an app for that. Seismologists have harnessed the motion-sensing accelerometers built into smartphones to detect tremors. The app, called MyShake, could eventually provide early warning of approaching quakes in regions lacking sophisticated seismometer networks, Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said February 11 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Environmentalists hoping that micromanaging Europe’s forests will help curb climate change may be barking up the wrong tree.
The supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone National Park may not have resulted from a rising plume of hot rock from the planet’s depths as previously suggested.
A rapid loss of phytoplankton threatens to turn the western Indian Ocean into an “ecological desert,” a new study warns. The research reveals that phytoplankton populations in the region fell an alarming 30 percent over the last 16 years.
More than 150 years ago, Jules Verne imagined a fantastic voyage into Earth’s depths. In reality, the planet’s innards are no less remarkable than the Jurassic–period monsters and subterranean labyrinths that Verne envisioned: Iron crystals stretch 20 kilometers long, colossal plumes of liquefied rock surge toward the surface and fragments of ancient seafloors lie entombed in the mantle.
Things are definitely heating up. Spurred by global warming and a “super El Niño,” 2015 smashed records, becoming by far Earth’s hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
When you see a bad moon rising, expect an ever-so-slightly wetter day. The lunar gravitational pull imperceptibly boosts rainfall when the moon is on the horizon and somewhat reduces rainfall when the moon is overhead or on the opposite side of the Earth, a new analysis of global rainfall concludes.