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NASA

New Data on What Greenland Was Like Almost 3 Million Years Ago

New Data on What Greenland Was Like Almost 3 Million Years Ago

written by Environmental News Network

Glaciers and ice sheets are commonly thought to work like a belt sander. As they move over the land they scrape off everything — vegetation, soil and even the top layer of bedrock. So a team of university scientists and a NASA colleague were greatly surprised to discover an ancient tundra landscape preserved under the Greenland Ice Sheet, below two miles of ice.

“We found organic soil that has been frozen to the bottom of the ice sheet for 2.7 million years,” said University of Vermont geologist and lead author Paul Bierman. The finding provides strong evidence that the Greenland Ice Sheet has persisted much longer than previously known, enduring through many past periods of global warming.

Greenland is a place of great interest to scientists and policymakers because the future stability of its huge ice sheet — the size of Alaska — will have a fundamental influence on how fast and high global sea levels rise from human-caused climate change.

“The ancient soil under the Greenland ice sheet helps to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change,” said Dylan Rood, a co-author on the new study, from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre and the University of California, Santa Barbara. “How did big ice sheets melt and grow in response to changes in temperature?”

The new discovery indicates that even during the warmest periods since the ice sheet formed, the center of Greenland remained stable. “It’s likely that it did not fully melt at any time,” Bierman said. This allowed a tundra landscape to be locked away, unmodified, under ice through millions of years of global warming and cooling.

“Some ice sheet models project that the Greenland Ice Sheet completely melted during previous interglacial periods. These data suggest that did not happen,” said co-author Tom Neumann, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We don’t know how much of the ice sheet remained — to estimate it, we’d have to study other ice cores in Greenland that have sediment in the bottom to see if ancient soil is preserved under those sites as well.”

The scientists tested seventeen samples of “dirty ice” — ice with sediment mixed in — from the bottommost 40 feet of the 10,019-foot GISP2 ice core extracted from Summit, Greenland, in 1993. From this sediment, Bierman and a team at the University of Vermont’s Cosmogenic Nuclide Laboratory extracted a rare form of the element beryllium, an isotope called beryllium-10. Formed by cosmic rays, it falls from the sky and sticks to rock and soil. The longer soil is exposed at Earth’s surface, the more beryllium-10 it accumulates. Measuring how much is in soil or a rock gives geologists a kind of exposure clock.

Photo shows a piece of the GISP2 ice core that the researchers analyzed for the isotope beryllium-10, showing silt and sand embedded in ice. Soon after this picture was taken, the ice was crushed in the University of Vermont clean lab and the sediment was isolated for analysis.

The researchers expected to only find soil eroded from glacier-scoured bedrock in the sediment at the bottom of the ice core. But the silt they did find had very high concentrations of beryllium-10 when the team measured it on a particle accelerator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif.

Article by Roger Greenway



April 21, 2014 0 comment
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New Satellite Tracks Global Precipitation in Unprecedented Detail

New Satellite Tracks Global Precipitation in Unprecedented Detail

written by Yale Environment 360

Launched into space late last month, a new Earth-observing satellite from NASA and the Japan space agency has captured its first images, which show an extra-tropical cyclone off the coast of Japan at unprecedented resolution.

The satellite, called the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, combines two powerful instruments that allow scientists to monitor precipitation around the globe in great detail, as the cyclone image demonstrates.

One instrument, the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar, captured a three-dimensional cross-section of the storm, with the heaviest precipitation shown in red and yellow. The second tool, a GPM Microwave Imager, observed different types of precipitation across a broad swath of the storm. Together, the instruments will help scientists more accurately predict rainfall and calculate how much precipitation falls to the Earth’s surface.



March 27, 2014 0 comment
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Global Forest Watch Tool Allows ‘Near-Real Time’ Forest Monitoring

written by Yale Environment 360

A new online tool called Global Forest Watch employs a trove of high-resolution NASA satellite imagery and large amounts of computing power to help governments, conservation organizations, and concerned citizens monitor deforestation in “near-real time.”

Organized by the World Resources Institute (WRI),

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February 21, 2014 0 comment
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NASA Animation Shows Relentless Pace of Warming Since 1950

written by Yale Environment 360

A 15-second NASA animation shows the steady and rapid warming of the planet since the middle of the 20th century, with regions in the Arctic and Siberia warming as much as 2 to 4 degrees C (3.6 to 7. 2 degrees F) above a long-term average.

The animation begins in 1950, but the intensity of

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January 31, 2014 0 comment
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Climate Projections for the US Revealed

written by Walter Wang

For the first time, maps and summaries of historical and projected temperature and precipitation changes for the 21st century for the continental U.S. are accessible at a county-by-county level on a website developed by the U.S. Geological Survey in collaboration with the College of Earth, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State

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December 11, 2013 0 comment
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NASA Releases Satellite Images of Typhoon Haiyan

written by Walter Wang

Typhoon Haiyan made landfall last week, causing much destruction in Southeast Asia. With death counts estimated to be in the thousands, this storm is one of the most powerful recorded typhoons to ever hit land and likely the deadliest natural disaster to hit the Philippines. So far, the typhoon is said to have affected at least 9.7 million people in 41 provinces.

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November 13, 2013 0 comment
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Global Warming as a Piece of Music

written by Walter Wang

What does the changing climate sound like? It’s an unusual question , but one that has now has at least one answer. University of Minnesota student Daniel Crawford, who turned climate change data from 1880 to 2012 into a musical composition.

Crawford used surface temperature data provided by

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July 18, 2013 0 comment
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NASA Test Flights Affirm Viability of Biofuel-Powered Commercial Jets

written by Yale Environment 360

In recent test flights, NASA researchers have confirmed that commercial airliners can safely fly on an alternative jet fuel blend and that under some conditions the biofuel mix produced 30 percent fewer emissions than typical jet fuel.

After flying DC-8 aircraft using a biofuel blend

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April 28, 2013 0 comment
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Climate Scientist James Hansen to Retire from NASA to Pursue Climate Change Activism

written by Walter Wang

I’m sad to see that climate scientist James E. Hansen, after a 46-year career at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will retire to pursue his activism on climate change. I can only image that the federal government is happy to see Hansen go; I always imagined his extremely visible presence as something of a much-needed thorn in the side.

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April 8, 2013 0 comment
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Earth-Observing Satellite Is Launched by NASA at Crucial Moment

written by Yale Environment 360

NASA is expected to launch this week its newest Earth-observing satellite, Landsat 8, at a time when previous Landsat satellites have either stopped working or have developed serious technical problems.

NASA scientists say the launch of the $855 million satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California

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February 12, 2013 0 comment
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NASA Map Shows Air Pollution Across Asia and the Middle East

written by Yale Environment 360

New satellite data released by NASA provide dramatic visual evidence of the dangerous air quality reported from cities across Asia and the Middle East this month.

Based on data collected from its satellite-based Ozone Monitoring Instrument, a map released by NASA scientists illustrates high levels of nitrogen

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January 22, 2013 0 comment
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Eco Aviation Reaches New Heights

written by Walter Wang

In 2010 NASA launched its N+3 initiative which awarded four major airlines extensive funds to research, design and develop more environmentally friendly aircraft. Lockheed Martin, MIT, GE Aviation and Boeing have been charged with the challenge to create a commercial plane that would expend 75% less emissions and consume 70% less fuel. Not a

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December 27, 2012 1 comment
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NASA Visualization Captures Record Year for Wildfires in the U.S.

written by Yale Environment 360

This year has been an unusually severe one for wildfires in the U.S., with more than 9.1 million acres of land burned through the end of November, federal officials say.

The total affected area, which is depicted in a new NASA map, is already the third-largest since records were first kept in 1960, and will likely break previous

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December 12, 2012 0 comment
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NASA Study Quantifies Vast Amount of Dust Reaching North America

written by Yale Environment 360

A new NASA study calculates that nearly 64 million tons of dust, pollution, and other tiny particles enter the atmosphere above North America from other continents each year, nearly as much as the 69 million tons of aerosols produced domestically through natural processes and human activities.

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August 6, 2012 0 comment
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