Latest Beryllium-10 Stories

By Joshua E. Brown, University of VermontEvery mountain and hill shall be made low, declared the ancient prophet Isaiah. In other words: erosion happens. But for the modern geologist a vexing question remains: how fast does this erosion happen?For more than a century, scientists have looked for ways to measure and compare erosion rates across differing landscapes around the globe"”but with limited success."Knowing the background rate of erosion for a place is extremely important," says...

Raimund Muscheler is a researcher at the Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at Lund University in Sweden. In the latest issue of the journal Science, he and his colleagues have described how the surface water temperature in the tropical parts of the eastern Pacific varied with the sun's activity between 7 000 and 11 000 years ago (early Holocene). Contrary to what one might intuitively believe, high solar activity had a cooling effect in this region."It is perhaps a similar...