Latest Historical geology Stories
SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- FX Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ: FXEN) issued an operations update on its activities in Poland. Kutno-2 Well The Kutno-2 well has reached a depth of 6,576 meters, 126 meters deeper than the projected total depth when the well was originally started. The well has encountered reasonably good gas shows and temperatures favorable for hydrocarbon presence throughout the Rotliegend section. However, the porosities seen in the well cores are not...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Modern climatologists have access to a wide array of technological tools, but an international team looking to study climate events from the past thousand years has decided to utilize something a little more old school. Researchers led by Alan Wanamaker from Iowa State University have been collecting clam shells from the waters of the North Atlantic because the mollusks act as tiny recorders, storing information about their environment...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Geochemists from the University of California, Riverside teamed up with an international team of scientists to uncover new evidence linking together extreme climate change, elevation of oxygen levels and early animal evolution. Scientists have long speculated that a dramatic rise in atmospheric oxygen levels was the trigger for early animal evolution. The direct cause-and-effect relationships between environmental and animal...
Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The climate change we are currently experiencing, while disconcerting and increasingly uncomfortable, is not unprecedented when viewed through the historical prism of life on Earth. A study led by researchers from Texas A&M University's Department of Oceanography looks back at the water cycle that affected the Western United States in an era dating back some 20,000 years. Focusing on the deserts of Utah and Nevada, the team...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Arctic sea ice has stopped receding this year, but not before reaching its smallest extent, breaking the previous record set in the summer of 2007, by 18 percent. The new low sets the summertime ice area extent to about 2.1 million square miles, according to estimates from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado. This year’s unprecedented ice melt in the Arctic is the clearest sign yet of global climate...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Around 2.5 million years ago, a huge meteor collided with the Earth and fell into the southern Pacific Ocean. A new study, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, suggests that not only could this have caused a massive tsunami, but it may also have plunged the world into the Ice Ages. A research team from Australia says that because the Eltanin meteor – which was up to two kilometers across – crashed into deep water, the...
New Geology articles posted online ahead of print 4–18 September 2012 Highlights are provided below. Geology articles published ahead of print can be accessed online at http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent. All abstracts are open-access at http://geology.gsapubs.org/; representatives of the media may obtain complimentary Geology articles by contacting Kea Giles at the address above. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research, led by the University at Buffalo, is examining an important mystery surrounding climate change: How quickly do glaciers melt and grow in response to shifts in temperature. According to the study, published in Science, glaciers on Canada's Baffin Island expanded rapidly during a brief cold snap about 8,200 years ago. This discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that shows ice sheets reacted rapidly in the past to...
Pitt scientists also discover unexpected complexity to the US West's patterns of drought during the Middle Ages Through an exploration of tree rings and oxygen isotopes, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are now able to better pinpoint the history of droughts in the arid and semiarid areas of the American West. A paper published in the online July 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the Medieval Climate Anomaly, a particularly warm period...
Brett Smith for RedOrbit.com Oxygen-based life evolved on Earth because of geological events that occurred over 2.5 million years ago, according to Princeton University researchers who published a report this week in the online journal Nature. Based on geological evidence, scientists know that roughly 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen levels in the atmosphere exploded and eventually gave birth to our present atmosphere. This time period, dubbed the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), appears to...
Latest Historical geology Reference Libraries
Rainforests are forests that are characterized by high levels of rainfall, with definitions based on a minimum usual annual rainfall of about 68 to 78 inches. The monsoon trough, or otherwise known as the intertropical convergence zone, holds an important role in producing the climatic conditions that are essential for the Earth’s tropical rainforests. About 40 to 75 percent of all biotic species are native to the rainforests. It’s been estimated that there might be many millions of...
Climate change is a substantial and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods of time ranging from decades to millions of years. It might be a change in the average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions. Climate change is a result of factors that include oceanic processes, biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received buy Earth, volcanic eruptions, and plate tectonics, and human induced alterations...
The Neoproterozoic is the third of three subdivisions of the Proterozoic Eon (occurring from 1 billion years ago to 542 million years ago). This terminal era of the Proterozoic is itself divided into three sub-periods called the Tonian, Cryogenian, and Ediacaran Periods. The most severe glaciation known in the geologic record occurred during the Cryogenian Period, when ice sheets reached the equator and formed a possible “Snowball Earth.” And the earliest fossils of multi-cellular life...
The Paleoproterozoic is the first of three subdivisions of the Proterozoic Eon (occurring from 2.5 billion to 1.6 billion years ago (Ga). This period is marked by the first stabilization of the continents, and also when cyanobacteria--a type of bacteria that uses biochemical processes of photosynthesis to produce oxygen--evolved. Experts have found paleontological evidence that during at least part of the Paleoproterozoic era, about 1.8 Ga, the earth year was about 450 days long, with days...
The Archean (formerly Archaeozoic) is a geologic eon between the Hadean and Proterozoic eons. The Archean Eon begins at roughly 3.8 billion years ago (Ga) and ends at about 2.5 Ga. But unlike all other geological ages, which are based on stratigraphy, The Archean eon is defined chronometrically. The lower boundary of 3.8 Ga has also not been officially recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. The name Archean is derived from the ancient Greek (Arkhe), meaning...
