A team of University of Utah seismologists discovered and made images of a reservoir of hot, partly molten rock about 19 to 45 km (12 to 28 miles) beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano, and it is 4.4 times larger than the shallower, long-known magma chamber.The hot rock
How is lightning initiated in thunderclouds? This is difficult to answer – how do you measure electric fields inside large, dangerously charged clouds? It was discovered, more or less by coincidence, that cosmic rays provide suitable probes to measure electric fields wi
According to present plans, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) — now under construction across the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia — will be the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, and one of the 12 largest in the world. But controversy has surrounded t
Researchers have long known that there was water in the form of ice on Mars. Now, new research from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity shows that it is possible that there is liquid water close to the surface of Mars. The explanation is that the substance perchlorate
In the clouds of Jupiter, scientists have found evidence of a type of atmospheric wave that had long been proposed but had not been identified in images before now.Researchers consider this kind of wave, called a Kelvin wave, a fundamental part of a planetary atmosphere
When a missile or meteor strikes the earth, the havoc above ground is obvious, but the details of what happens below ground are harder to see.Duke University physicists have developed techniques that enable them to simulate high-speed impacts in artificial soil and sand
An international team, including researchers at the University of Liverpool, have shown that south east Iceland is underlain by continental crust.The team found that the accepted theory, that Iceland consists only of very thick oceanic crust, is incorrect. Maps of crust
A group of Russian, European and American scientists have found a warm layer in Venus’ atmosphere, the nature of which is still unknown. The researchers made the discovery when compiling a temperature map of the upper atmosphere on the planet’s night side ba
Scientists from the The Ohio State University have discovered how to control heat with a magnetic field and presented their findings in the March 23 issue of the journal Nature Materials. The study is the first ever to prove that acoustic phonons – the elemental particl
A 400 km-wide impact zone from a huge meteorite that broke in two moments before it slammed into the Earth has been found in central Australia. The crater from the impact millions of years ago has long disappeared, but a team of geophysicists has found the twin scars of
