• Floods strip Midwest of tons of valuable topsoil

    Floods are stripping the Midwest of its most valuable resource: soil; farmers and environmentalists are at odds over what to do with erosion-prone land — take their chances planting crops on marginal land in hopes of good yields and high grain prices, or plant trees, native grasses, or ground cover that act as a natural flood buffer

  • Earth's surface features predict earthquakes

    Seismologists could make better use of the surface features of mountains to detect the troubles which lurk beneath

  • Midwest floods to create record dead zone in Gulf of Mexico

    Each year, an influx of nutrients — mainly nitrogen — which come from fertilizers flushed out of the Mississippi basin creates dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico — zones where there is not enough oxygen to sustain life; the summer’s Midwest floods flush record levels of nutrients into the Gulf, creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey

  • Better picture of what lies beneath the Earth's surface

    A tool which measures minute changes in the planet’s gravity field from the air allows a cheaper alternative to seismic surveying

  • NASA's UAV helps fight California wild fires

    Fire crews are fighting more than 1,700 blazes that have blackened 829,000 acres of California this fire season; they need all the help they can get — and NASA extends such help by lending the state a modified Predator UAV

  • Evidence of acid rain supports meteorite theory of Tunguska catastrophe

    There are many theories about the source of the mysterious 1908 explosion in Siberia, an explosion which leveled more than 80 million trees over an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers; presence of acid rain lends support to one of them

  • Predicting hurricanes

    During the summer and autumn, a large body of warm water with a surface temperature of more than 28 °C appears in the Gulf of Mexico; at certain times the current cannot remove heat fast enough from the gulf, creating conditions that are particularly favorable for intense hurricane formation

  • California unveils GIS initiative

    Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) enhance the technology for environmental protection, natural resource management, traffic flow, emergency preparedness and response, land use planning, and health and human services; California wants to avail itself of the technology’s benefits

  • Global warming will cause storms to intensify

    Daniel Bernoulli’s eighteenth-century equation basically says that as wind speed increases, air pressure decreases; his equation leaves out variables that were considered difficult to deal with such as friction and energy sources; Wolverines researchers now include these additional variables and find that for every 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit that the Earth’s surface temperature warms, the intensity of storms could increase by at least a few percent

  • Rising sea level threatens U.K. coastal rail lines

    Andrew McNaughton, Network Rail’s chief engineer: “The effects of climate change, and in particular sea level rise, are likely to increase the severity of the wave, tidal and wind effects on coastal defenses”

  • U.K. critical infrastructure vulnerable

    New report says last summer’s flood showed infrastructure’s vulnerability; funding for flood defenses was not sufficient or secure, undermining industry confidence, and there were not enough skilled engineers to deliver the protection from flooding needed

  • Israeli government prepares for major earthquake in north

    In one three-month period this year, around 500 small tremors were recorded in northern Israel; Israeli government health officials urge hospitals, municipalities to prepare for worst

  • Scientists probe mysterious 1908 Siberian mystery

    On 30 June 1908 an explosion equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT occurred approximately 3-6 miles above the Stony Tunguska River in a remote area of central Siberia; 80 million trees felled by the explosion over an area of some 2,100 square kilometres; the night sky was lit up across Europe and Asia and the shock waves were detected as far away as Britain; to date, there is no agreed explanation of the event

  • Is flooding really as big a risk to Britain now as terrorism?

    In 2007 the U.K. saw disastrous summer flooding in Yorkshire and the Severn valley around Gloucester and Tewkesbury. These floods caused the largest peacetime emergency in Britain since the Second World War

  • Protecting IT infrastructure

    The U.S. National Weather Service says that 910 storms had already been recorded by mid-May, a considerable number when compared with 1,093 confirmed tornadoes for all of 2007; U.S. business had better be prepared