Cars have options of bio fuels and electricity.. Ships have nuclear options... But what fuel option does an airplane have? We hear of airline fleets expanding and newer, better and bigger airports being built all the time, but is there an eternal source of jet fuel?   Read the rest of the entry...

Indeed, different computer models do give different results, in detail. However, they also agree on some things. Where they agree is in showing an overall warming in response to greenhouse gas increase. This warming is greater in high latitudes than in low latitudes. In low latitudes, increased cloud cover presumably provides for increased shading, slowing the warming. The risks of scaling back on carbon-based energy are quite different for different nations, as are the potential benefits of reducing emissions. The nations where risks of emission reduction outweigh the potential benefits will insist that more studies are needed before decisions can be made. The larger the region occupied by a nation, the greater the resilience to possible problems. Thus, we would expect the USA, Russia, China, India, Canada, and Australia to be less interested in the problem than for example Egypt, Bangladesh and the Pacific island nations. As mentioned, different computer models give somewhat different predictions when experiments are made to test their response to changing conditions. The reason is not that the physics of climate change is different from one scientist to another. The reason is that many of the physical processes are not sufficiently understood, or resolved in sufficient ...  Read the rest of the entry...

What sort of environment would you have bewteen a desert and a typical forest of the north? I'm currently writing a book and the characters are first in a forest in the northern hemisphere, and I want them to get into a desert. What do I make them cross to get to the desert? What sort of environment, or geological feature would there be that could be a transition environment bewteen the forest and the desert?   Read the rest of the entry...

im still working on my decade project so i have queastions: how were people effecting our environment in the 70s? what laws were out into efferct to protect it? what was TV like in the 70s? what trends in televishion were there? please please please try to answer at least 1 queastion for me please! and please leave any website you can that has helpful information! thanks!!!   Read the rest of the entry...

An interdisciplinary research team will be collecting water and ice cores to study the microbial communities found in the Transantarctic Mountains and the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica. Once believed to be devoid of life, closer observations of glacial ice have revealed microhabitats teeming with life. In these extreme conditions, microorganisms live in the liquid water phases of ice, and they depend upon dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the water for food and nutrients. Although DOM is found in every environment and is an important component of the global carbon cycle, we still need more basic information about it, such as how DOM forms and changes over time. The research team will be comparing the microbes and DOM in two different types of Antarctic streams: "normal" streams that flow out of a lake and a "supraglacial" stream that forms on top of a glacier each summer. Because the supraglacial stream forms each year from a relatively clean surface, the investigators have a unique chance to study how the microbial community and DOM "start from scratch" and develop over time. By isolating the DOM and studying its chemical and structural composition, the team hopes to learn more about how the contributions and interactions between ...  Read the rest of the entry...

A large international team of scientists and drilling technicians will be working throughout the austral summer to continue to assemble and test the world's largest scientific instrument, the in-ice IceCube Neutrino Detector that is about 75% complete. Neutrinos are incredibly common (about 10 million pass through your body as you read this) subatomic particles that have no electric charge and almost no mass. They are created by radioactive decay and nuclear reactions, such as those on the Sun and other stars. Neutrinos rarely react with other particles or forces; in fact, most of them pass through objects (like you, or the entire earth) without any interaction. This makes them ideal for carrying information from distant parts of the universe, but it also makes them very hard to detect. All neutrino detectors rely on observing the extremely rare instances when a neutrino does collide with a proton. This collision transforms the neutrino into a muon, a charged particle that can travel for 5-10 miles and generate detectable light.   Read the rest of the entry...

West Antarctic Ice Sheet Using a large hollow drill, the WAIS Divide Ice Core Drilling team aims to collect a 3,500-meter-long ice core, or sample of ice, from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Because of the weight of the overlying snowpack, snow that falls and accumulates on ice sheets re-crystallizes and forms annual layers over time. The ice core recovered during the project will have annual resolution, or distinct yearly markings, for the past 40,000 years! In ice sheets, the compression of snow traps small bubbles of air in the layers of ice. By measuring concentrations of greenhouse gasses and non-greenhouse gasses and their isotopes trapped within bubbles in the ice, the team aims to develop climate records dating back to 100,000 years before present. This ice core will provide the first Southern Hemisphere climate and greenhouse gas records of comparable time, resolution, and duration to ice cores previously recovered in Greenland. The ice core will enable scientists to make detailed comparisons of greenhouse gas concentrations and environmental conditions between the Northern and Southern hemispheres with a greater level of detail than previously possible. The biology of the ice collected will also be investigated.   Read the rest of the entry...

Originally from upstate New York, Michele Cross is a special education teacher who currently teaches an Introduction to Science class and a variety of English classes at Corning East High School in Corning, New York. When not in the classroom, Mrs. Cross can be found coaching both tennis and soccer for her school district. Likewise, she enjoys cycling, hiking, and gardening in the summer months and snowshoeing and cross-country skiing in the winter. She particularly loves spending summers with her niece and nephew in Colorado. While climbing her first 14,000-foot mountain a couple of summers ago, she learned that her hair could stand on end even in the midst of hail and rain due to the highly charged air around her! Mrs. Cross is thrilled beyond belief to be given this opportunity, and she hopes that it will inspire her students to dream great dreams! Stacy Kim is a Benthic Ecologist, a scientist who studies the communities of animals living on and in the seafloor. She is especially interested in disturbances and the ecological changes that occur in response to them. In Antarctica, disturbances are from ice - icebergs, anchor ice, and glaciers - and from large animals - humans, penguins, ...  Read the rest of the entry...

A team of scientists is heading to warming Alaska to recover ice cores from glaciers, in an effort to better understand how the Pacific Northwest fits into the larger climate-change picture. The expedition is headed by Cameron Wake of the UNH (University of New Hampshire) Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) and Karl Kreutz of the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, who will head to Denali National Park on the second leg of a multi-year mission. The month-long reconnaissance mission will identify specific drill sites for surface-to-bedrock ice cores that will provide researchers with the best climate records going back some 2,000 years. The fieldwork is part of a decade-long goal to gather climate records from ice cores from around the entire Arctic region. Just as any one meteorological station cant tell you about regional or hemispheric climate change, a series of ice cores is needed to understand the regional climate variability in the Arctic, said Wake. This effort is part of a broader strategy that will give us a fuller picture, he added. According to Kreutz, the 2,000-year ice core record will provide a good window for determining how the climate system has been affected by volcanic activity, the ...  Read the rest of the entry...

The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change is the leading body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences. The IPCC is a scientific body. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis. Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, to ensure an objective and complete assessment of current information. Differing viewpoints existing within the scientific community are reflected in the IPCC reports. The IPCC is an intergovernmental body, and it is open to all member countries of UN and WMO. Governments are involved in the IPCC work as they can participate in the review process and in the IPCC plenary sessions, where main decisions about the IPCC workprogramme are taken and reports are accepted, adopted and ...  Read the rest of the entry...