"A previously overlooked factor — the position of continents — helps fill Earth’s oceans with life-supporting oxygen. Continental movement could ultimately have the opposite effect, killing most deep ocean creatures. 'Continental drift seems so slow, like nothing drastic could come from it, but when the ocean is primed, even a seemingly tiny event could trigger...
"New research has identified a lesser-known form of ozone playing a big role in heating the Southern Ocean — one of Earth’s main cooling systems. Ozone is a gas composed of three oxygen atoms. Many studies have described ozone in the stratosphere, and its role in shielding people from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. Closer...
"Geology Professor Andy Ridgwell has been named a 2021 fellow of the American Geophysical Union, or AGU, one of the most significant honors a scientist in earth sciences can receive. AGU is a large international society dedicated to promoting Earth and space science. It elects fewer than 0.1% of its 60,000 members each year to...
Humans must reduce carbon dioxide and aerosol pollution simultaneously to avoid weakening the ocean’s ability to keep the planet cool, new research shows. Aerosol pollution refers to particles in the air emitted by vehicles and factories that burn fossil fuels. This pollution contributes to asthma, bronchitis, and long-term irritation of the respiratory tract, which can...
Climate change is warming the ocean, but it’s warming land faster and that’s really bad news for air quality all over the world, says a new University of California, Riverside study. The study, published February 4 in Nature Climate Change, shows that the contrast in warming between the continents and sea, called the land-sea warming...
"RIVERSIDE, Calif. ( www.ucr.edu) — So here’s the good news: Despite fears to the contrary, California isn’t facing a year-round drought in our warming new world. However, UC Riverside Earth Sciences Professor Robert Allen’s research indicates that what precipitation the state does get will be pretty much limited to the winter months — think deluge-type...
"Under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions, climate models predict California will get warmer during the rest of the century and most also predict the state will get drier." Read More
"For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t. Scientists thought they knew why, but a new modeling study from the Alternative Earths team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute has fired the lead actor in that long-accepted scenario." Read More
"A University of California, Riverside assistant professor and a team of researchers have found that the cloudy storm tracks on Earth are moving toward the poles and subtropical dry zones are expanding. Cloud tops are also moving higher in the atmosphere. The findings, based on satellite cloud records, confirm computer climate models that have predicted...
"Earthquakes are labeled “shallow” if they occur at less than 50 kilometers depth. They are labeled “deep” if they occur at 300-700 kilometers depth. When slippage occurs during these earthquakes, the faults weaken. How this fault weakening takes place is central to understanding earthquake sliding. A new study published online in Nature Geoscience today by...
"An understanding of the history of Earth is incomplete without an understanding of how and why the planet developed an oxygenated atmosphere. A team of scientists, including Timothy Lyons, a distinguished professor of biogeochemistry, reports new isotopic data in Science Advances that illustrate how photosynthetic cyanobacteria temporarily spiked concentrations of oxygen around 2.5 billion years...
"Oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose dramatically about 600 million years ago, coinciding with the first proliferation of animal life. Since then, numerous short-lived biotic events — typically marked by significant climatic perturbations — took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically." Read More
"The Summit fire burned more than 3,000 acres of vegetation near Banning, Calif., in early May this year, giving Southern California’s fire season an early start. What lies in store for the rest of the fire season this year? Richard Minnich, a professor of Earth sciences and a noted fire ecologist at the University of...
"A research team of biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has provided a new view on the relationship between the earliest accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably the most important biological event in Earth history, and its relationship to the sulfur cycle." Read More
"The University of California, Riverside's Mary Droser discusses why she believes teaching climate change to young students is crucial and why, despite abundant research, some people remain skeptical about global warming. In 2010 Droser, a paleontologist, received a NASA grant to develop innovative approaches for communicating climate change science to undergraduates and high school students...
"The conventional view of the history of the Earth is that the oceans became oxygen-rich to approximately the degree they are today in the Late Ediacaran Period (about 600 million years ago) after staying relatively oxygen-poor for the preceding four billion years. But biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside have found evidence that shows...
"A popular view among geophysicists is that large amounts of water are carried from the oceans to the deep mantle in “subduction zones,” which are boundaries where the Earth’s crustal plates converge, with one plate riding over the other. But now geophysicists led by the University of California, Riverside’s Harry Green, a distinguished professor of...
"A research team led by biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has developed a detailed and dynamic three-dimensional model of Earth’s early ocean chemistry that can significantly advance our understanding of how early animal life evolved on the planet." Read More
