Phys.org October 1, 2021 US scientists on Thursday piloted a camera-equipped ocean drone called “Saildrone” that looks like a robotic surfboard into a Category 4 hurricane barreling across the Atlantic Ocean. Dramatic footage released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed the small craft battling 50-feet high waves and winds of over 120 mph inside Hurricane Sam. Powered by wind and 23 feet in length, it carries a specially designed “hurricane wing,” designed to withstand punishing conditions as it collects data to help scientists learn more about one of Earth’s most destructive forces. Saildrone’s website indicates it can record […]
Tag Archives: global warming
New ‘risk triage’ platform pinpoints compounding threats to US infrastructure
MIT News October 4, 2021 Researchers at MIT are developing multi-sector dynamics (MSD) to home in on compounding risks and potential tipping points across interconnected natural and human systems and explore interactions and interdependencies among human and natural systems, and how these systems may adapt, interact, and co-evolve in response to short-term shocks and long-term influences and stresses. Tipping points occur when these systems can no longer sustain multiple, co-evolving stresses. The modeling tools were used in selected regions of the United States. MIT Socio-Environmental Triage (MST) platform, a screening-level visualization tool allows users to examine risks, identify hot spots. […]
Melting of polar ice shifting Earth itself, not just sea levels
Phys.org September 22, 2021 The loss of melting ice from land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica are causing the planet’s crust to warp slightly, even in spots more than 1,000 kilometres from the ice loss. A team of researchers in the US (Harvard University, Columbia University) analyzed satellite data on melt from 2003 to 2018 and studied changes in Earth’s crust to measure the shifting of the crust horizontally. They found that in some places the crust was moving more horizontally than it was lifting. They demonstrated that mass changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet and high latitude glacier […]
Scientists still don’t know how far melting in Antarctica will go, or the sea level rise it will unleash
Phys.org September 21, 2021 Ice loss from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets was the largest contributor to sea level rise in recent decades. Adapting to the projected sea level rise that will have widespread effects in Australia and around the world due to ice sheet melt are so wide that developing ways for societies to adapt will be incredibly expensive and difficult. An international scientific collaboration known as the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6) is quantifying how much Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to sea level rise has identified basal melt, the melting of ice shelves from underneath, […]
AI system identifies buildings damaged by wildfire
Phys.org September 16, 2021 Existing technologies lack accuracy and ability to scale to effectively aid disaster relief and recovery. Even today, most wildfire event inspectors visit sites and manually classify building damage using before and after images of the buildings. A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, California Polytechnic State University) has developed DamageMap, an artificial intelligence-powered post-wildfire building damage classifier. It is a binary classifier. Unlike existing solutions DamageMap relies on post-wildfire images alone by separating the segmentation and classification tasks. The model has an overall accuracy of 98% on the validation set (five wildfire events all […]
Decaying forest wood releases 10.9 billion tons of carbon yearly, which will increase with climate change
Phys.org September 2, 2021 The amount of carbon stored in deadwood is equivalent to about 8 per cent of the global forest carbon stocks. The decomposition of deadwood is largely governed by microorganisms and insects contributing to variations in the decomposition rates. An international team of researchers from a number of countries including Germany and USA conducted a field experiment of wood decomposition across 55 forest sites and 6 continents to show that the deadwood decomposition rates increase with temperature, and the strongest temperature effect is found at high precipitation levels. As a net effect insects accelerate the decomposition in tropical […]
‘Tipping points’ in Earth’s system triggered rapid climate change 55 million years ago
Science Daily August 31, 2021 The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a period of geologically-rapid carbon release and global warming ~56 million years ago. Although modelling, outcrop and proxy records suggest volcanic carbon release occurred, it has not yet been possible to identify the PETM trigger, or if multiple reservoirs of carbon were involved. An international team of researchers (UK, Denmark, USA – UC Riverside) report that elevated levels of mercury relative to organic carbon—a proxy for volcanism—directly preceding and within the early PETM from two North Sea sedimentary cores, signifying pulsed volcanism from the North Atlantic Igneous Province likely […]
Precipitation in Central Asia shaped by sea surface temperature over tropical Pacific and North Atlantic
Phys.org August 26, 2021 Central Asia is one of the major food-producing regions in the world. Its agricultural production relies heavily on climate conditions, especially precipitation. Researchers in China found that both the decadal scale warming over the tropical Pacific and North Atlantic are favorable for wetter conditions over Central Asia. During the positive phase of tropical Pacific decadal variability (TPDV) (warm tropical Pacific), the sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies over tropical Pacific can lead to more precipitation over Central Asia, especially the southern and southeastern region. The warm phase of AMV (warm North Atlantic) can excite a circumglobal teleconnection […]
Effectively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Phys.org August 13, 2021 Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a comparatively new technology for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Since it would allow large amounts of CO2 to be trapped this technology could also reduce the greenhouse effect. To investigate how effectively this could be implemented with different system configurations of a certain process, researchers in Switzerland analyzed a total of five different configurations for capturing CO2 from the air and their use at eight different locations around the world. Autonomous system layouts prove to be a promising alternative, with a green house gases removal efficiency […]
Ice formation on surfaces enhanced via a non-classical nucleation process
Phys.org August 17, 2021 Understanding the process of ice formation can decelerate the rate at which glaciers melt and sea levels rise and alleviate other major environmental concerns. To better understand the non-classical nucleation theories researchers at the University of Hong Kong combined Markov State Models (MSMs) and transition path theory (TPT) to identify intermediate states of disordered ice mixtures and compare parallel pathways (classical vs. non-classical). This advantage helped unravel the underlying mechanisms of non-classical nucleation processes and the co-existence of the two pathways. They showed that the disordered mixing of ice stabilizes the critical nucleus and makes the […]