Latest Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists are reporting in the journal Water Resources Research the Middle East river basin is losing large quantities of water. The researchers used a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites to find that during a seven-year period, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basin have lost 117 million acre feet of freshwater, which is about the equivalent to the Dead Sea. Using NASA's twin...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Scientists at the University of California at Irvine (UC Irvine); NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.,...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Much has been said lately about Arctic ice melting at an alarming and record-breaking rate, but other ice fields are suffering the same effects of global warming as well. For the last 40 years, scientists have monitored the growing and shrinking of the ice fields in the southern most stretch of South America's Andes Mountains, detecting an overall ice loss as the climate warms. A new study, published in the September 5 issue of...

How much ice is Greenland is really losing? - Movement in the Earth's mantle? - Enough water for all? For the first time, the melting of glaciers in Greenland could now be measured with high accuracy from space. Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the twin satellites GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) a sharp image has surface, which also renders the spatial distribution of the glacial melt more precisely. The Greenland ice shield had to cope with up to 240 gigatons of...

[ Watch the Video ] In a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, scientists using NASA data have found that Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are losing nearly 150 billion tons of ice annually. Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), researchers were able to measure ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010. What...

The record-breaking drought in Texas that has fueled wildfires, decimated crops and forced cattle sales has also reduced groundwater levels in much of the state to the lowest levels in more than 60 years, according to new national maps produced by NASA using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) mission. The map are distributed by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The latest groundwater map,...

NASA has put to rest any speculations that Earth maybe expanding or contracting. New research has found that there has been no statistically significant expansion of the solid Earth. Tectonic forces like earthquakes and volcanoes push mountains higher, while erosion and landslides wear them down, helping to change the Earth's shape. However, despite the facelift, this new research - using space measurement tools and a new data calculation technique - says Earth's size will remain the same....

WASHINGTON, May 4, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Gravity Probe B (GP-B) mission has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which the spacecraft was designed to test. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The experiment, launched in 2004, used four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure the hypothesized geodetic effect, the warping of space and time around a gravitational body, and frame-dragging, the amount...

Gravity field satellites observe for the first time the fluctuations of ice mass of the Antarctic ice sheet due to El NinoThe change in the ice mass covering Antarctica is a critical factor in global climate events. Scientists at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have now found that the year by year mass variations in the western Antarctic are mainly attributable to fluctuations in precipitation, which are controlled significantly by the climate phenomenon El Nino. They examined...

NASA and European researchers have conducted a novel study to simultaneously measure, for the first time, trends in how water is transported across Earth's surface and how the solid Earth responds to the retreat of glaciers following the last major Ice Age, including the shifting of Earth's center of mass.To calculate the changes, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands; and the Netherlands Institute for Space...