Earth
- Earth
Antarctic sediments muddy climate debate
Ocean-floor sediments drilled from Antarctic regions recently covered by ice shelves suggest that those shelves were much younger than scientists had previously thought.
- Earth
Aircraft spies on health of coral reefs
Marine ecologists report the development of a new remote-sensing system that can assess the health of coral reefs from planes.
- Earth
L.A. moves, but not in the way expected
Researchers monitoring small ground motions along faults in Southern California ended up detecting an altogether different phenomenon: the rise and fall of the ground as local governments pump billions of gallons of water into and out of the region's aquifers.
- Earth
Sahara to get hotter, drier, smaller
By the end of this century, the world's hottest desert will be even hotter, drier, and smaller than it is now, according to an international team of climate modelers.
- Earth
Resetting a clock from Earth’s rocks
Better measurements of one of the rates of radioactive decay used to date extremely old rocks open up the possibility that Earth may have had a crust as many as 200 million years earlier than previously thought.
- Earth
Deep-sea gear takes wild ride on lava
When a set of instruments monitoring an underwater volcano got trapped in an eruption in early 1998, the scientists who had deployed the sensors ended up with more data than they bargained for.
- Agriculture
Gene Makes Tomatoes Tolerate Salt
The world's first genetically engineered salt-tolerant tomato plant may help farmers utilize spoiled lands.
- Earth
Climate accord reached
Negotiators, without U.S. representatives' input, resolved controversies in Bonn that were blocking an international treaty to limit greenhouse gases.
- Earth
Atlantic coast may be in for a pounding
The above-average number and strength of hurricanes in the North Atlantic during the past 6 years may signal the beginning of a threatening weather trend for the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America.
- Earth
Power Harvests
Farmers are finding that commercial wind power is the best new commodity to come along in years, one that can offer substantial year-round income.
- Earth
New type of hydrothermal vent looms large
The discovery of a new type of hydrothermal vent system on an undersea mountain in the Atlantic Ocean suggests that submarine hydrothermal activity may be much more widespread than previously thought.
- Earth
The Silence of the Bams
If a nuclear explosion were set off in a cavity of the right size and shape, even a moderate-sized nuclear bomb might appear at long distances to be no bigger than a routine explosion used in mining.
