The ocean is taking heat. That’s the conclusion of a new study that finds that Earth’s oceans now absorb heat at twice the rate they did 18 years ago. Around half of ocean heat uptake since 1865 has taken place since 1997, researchers also report online January 18 in Nature Climate Change.
Rumbling earthquakes could reveal faraway weak spots in Earth’s crust.
North Korea sent political shock waves around the world on January 6 when it claimed to have carried out a successful test of a hydrogen bomb, which, if true, would be a substantially more powerful and sophisticated class of weaponry than the country’s previous efforts. The underground test generated a magnitude 5.1 earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The report cards are out and some U.S. states are better prepared for climate change threats than others. Eighteen states got an overall D or worse.
For some exoplanets, just being in the Goldilocks zone isn’t enough. Planets need to be made up of the right stuff to become a cradle of life, new research suggests.
Earth’s deepest realm may be billions of years older than previously thought. New simulations of the planet’s formation suggest that the innermost part of the inner core solidified shortly after Earth’s assembly, rather than roughly 3 billion years later alongside the rest of the inner core.
Some rainbows don’t contain all the colors of the rainbow. The height of the sun above the horizon can yield arcs that contain only a fraction of the traditional ROYGBIV, researchers reported December 17 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
Fireworks light up the night sky, but they also fill it with visibility-reducing soot, researchers warn.
Climate change could turn the Arctic Ocean into an ice autobahn. Sea ice, much of it chunks of floating ice, is becoming younger and thinner as old ice melts. That new ice travels farther and faster than older ice, carrying dirt, organisms and pollution along for the ride, new research shows.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
Visions of the ancient Red Planet as a warm, wet paradise are misplaced, new research suggests. Studying the Martian landscape, Harvard University planetary scientist Robin Wordsworth reasoned that the planet was generally a cold and dry place 3.8 billion to 3.5 billion years ago.