Latest Physical geography Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online "Go with the flow" has been a standard, if somewhat glib, piece of nearly universally applicable advice for a long time – and never more so than now. Shujie Wang, a geography doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati's McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, recently led a team of researchers who discovered that the best way to monitor the environmental health of the Antarctic is just to go with the flow. The ice flow, that...
SOUTHPORT, England, April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Grass has always been a tough customer. Few other forms of plant life show such astonishing adaptability and resilience in the face of challenging conditions but the team at Turfland [http://www.turfland.co.uk ] are keen to point out that grass responds a little better when it receives a helping hand. After a long, cold winter that has stretched long into the spring time, grass is now facing a very new challenge. As this...
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic. An international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, has for the first time succeeded in creating a digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean...
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK) The first study of its kind to calculate the amount of nutrients entering and leaving the Arctic Ocean has been carried out by scientists based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Their results, which are published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, show that there is a mismatch between what goes into the Arctic Ocean and what comes out. This is the first study to look at the transport of dissolved inorganic...
Pensoft Publishers The 'Mongolian Death Worm', called olgoi-khorkhoi by the local population is a legendary animal with an unconfirmed existence that has preoccupied the imagination of the inhabitants and travelers in the region. It is said to inhabit the southern Gobi Desert where it terrorizes travelers with its deadly abilities to project acid that, upon contact, turns anything it touches yellow and corroded. Two new sub-species of earthworms, Eisenia nordenskioldi mongol and E. n....
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online On May 9, 1926, Richard E. Byrd attempted the first-ever roundtrip flight over the North Pole. While Byrd claimed to have reached the pole, the journey has been dogged by controversy and debate ever since, with some saying he never flew over the Earth’s northernmost point. According to a new report from Ohio State University astronomy professor Gerald Newsome in the Polar Record, Byrd never made it to the actual North Pole, but...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Fine particles in the air resulting from burning coal or volcanic eruptions can negatively affect coral growth, a team of climate scientists and coral ecologists from the UK, Australia and Panama has discovered. The study, which appears in this week’s edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that coral reefs respond to changes in the concentration of atmospheric pollution. Those particulates can shade the corals from...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers say that there was an abrupt and widespread climate change that took place in the Sahara Desert 5,000 years ago. About 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was full of landscape and vegetation, as well as numerous lakes. Ancient cave paintings in the region depict hippos in watering holes, and herds of elephants and giraffes. However, today this region is barren and inhospitable. The Sahara's "green" era lasted from 11,000 to...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Earth's tropical climate history has been revealed in unprecedented detail – year by year, for almost 1,800 years – by two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes. In 2003, a research team led by Ohio State University retrieved core samples from a Peruvian ice cap. They noticed some startling similarities to ice cores they had gathered from Tibet and the Himalayas. Even though the cores were taken from...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online While some may be lamenting the impending forces of climate change, Adélie penguins could actually benefit from rising global temperatures. According to a new study in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, the Adélie penguin population on Antarctica’s Beaufort Island increased 84 percent as the region’s ice fields retreated from 1958 to 2010. "This research raises new questions about how Antarctic species are impacted by a...
Latest Physical geography Reference Libraries
The dusky pademelon (Thylogale brunii), also known as the dusky wallaby, is a marsupial that can be found on the Kai and Aru islands, Papua New Guinea, and in the Trans Fly savanna and grasslands ecoregion in Papua Province in Indonesia. It prefers a habitat in both arid and tropical savannahs, forests, shrublands, lowlands, and grasslands. This species was named after its discoverer, Cornelis de Bruijn, and was once commonly known as philander, or “friend of man,” and the Aru Island...
Desert greening is made up of any number of methods used to revitalize deserts. So far, only arid and semi-arid desert are meant when using this expression. The icy deserts and other types are considered to be unsuitable. The different methods include landscaping methods to reduce evaporation, erosion, consolidation of topsoil, temperature, sandstorms and more, permaculture in general, planting trees, regeneration of salty, polluted, or degenerated soils, floodwater retention and...
Mammoth Cave National Park is located in the state of Kentucky in the United States. The park holds 52,830 acres of land that was once inhabited by Native Americans. Many mummies and artifacts have been found in Mammoth Cave and surrounding caves to support this. It is thought that first man of European descent to visit the area was John Houchin or Francis Houchin. The legend says that one of the brothers was hunting a wounded bear that entered the cave to hide. The first documented discovery...
Coral reefs are submerged structures consisting of calcium carbonate secreted by corals. Coral reefs are colonies of small animals found in marine waters that enclose few nutrients. The majority of coral reefs are constructed from stony corals, which then consist of polyps that come together in groups. The polyps are like small sea anemones, to which they are very closely related. Unlike the sea anemones, coral polyps secrete hard carbonate exoskeletons which provide support and protections...
Mudflats, or otherwise known as tidal flats, are coastal wetlands that form when mud is left behind by tides or rivers. They’re found in sheltered regions such as bayous, lagoons, estuaries, and bays. Mudflats might be seen geologically as exposed layers of bay mud, a result from the deposition of estuarine silts, marine animal detritus, and clays. The majority of the sediment in a mudflat is within the intertidal zone, therefore the flat is submerged and exposed about twice per day. In...
