Latest Physical geography Stories
Around half of Cambodia's tropical flooded grasslands have been lost in just 10 years according to new research from the University of East Anglia. The seasonally flooded grasslands around the Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, are of great importance for biodiversity and a refuge for 11 globally-threatened bird species. They are also a vital fishing, grazing, and traditional rice farming resource for around 1.1 million people. Research published today in the journal...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Despite immense pressure and a lack of sunlight, an abundance of microbes are thriving in the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean, claims new research published in Sunday’s edition of the journal Nature Geosciences. A team of scientists led by Ronnie Glud of the University of Southern Denmark explored the 36,000-foot deep Mariana Trench “unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments” of the Challenger Deep...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online What if you could drive down a road a few times and gather more data in an hour about the surrounding landscape than a team of surveyors could gather in a month? Mobile LIDAR is a powerful technology, only a few years old, which has the potential to do exactly that. It promises to change the way we see, study and record the world around us. Mobile LIDAR will have applications in transportation, hydrology, forestry, virtual tourism...
This year's record flooding will mean a glut of flood damaged cars and trucks on the market. A water restoration provider explains how to look for flood damage to vehicles. Cleveland, OH (PRWEB) March 14, 2013 Restoration Local, one of the leading providers of water damage repair and restoration in the United States, is offering tips for identifying used cars that may have suffered flood damage. Flood events result in flood damaged cars and trucks, many of which may end up on local...
AlphaGalileo Foundation To study the effects of ocean acidification, ten huge plastic containers called mesocosms are placed in the Gullmar Fjord in Sweden. The project is unique: mesocosms of this size have never been used for such a long period of time. The experiment is part of a worldwide research project, and includes researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. This is the largest and longest experiment on the impact of climate change on marine ecosystems that have been...
National Science Foundation Although they live in similarly extreme ecosystems at opposite ends of the world, Antarctic insects appear to employ entirely different methods at the genetic level to cope with extremely dry conditions than their counterparts that live north of the Arctic Circle, according to National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded researchers. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers concluded, "Polar arthropods have developed...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new tree-ring study, led by the University of Arizona, reveals that long-term droughts in Southwestern North America often mean a failure of both summer and winter rains. This contradicts a long held belief that a dry winter rainy season is usually followed by a wet monsoon season, or vice versa. According to the new data, both summer and winter rains were sparse year after year during the severe, multi-decadal droughts occurring...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Ever since a 20-foot sinkhole opened up beneath a Florida home on February 28, swallowing up an entire bedroom and resulting in the death of one of the residents, these natural phenomena have become fixtures in both newspaper headlines and the public consciousness. But what exactly are sinkholes? “Geologically, a sinkhole is a depression in the ground that has no natural external surface drainage. Basically this means that when...
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution All living organisms rely on iron as an essential nutrient. In the ocean, iron’s abundance or scarcity means all the difference as it fuels the growth of plankton, the base of the ocean’s food web. A new study by biogeochemists and glaciologists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) identifies an unexpectedly large source of iron to the North Atlantic – meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets, which may stimulate plankton growth during...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Last Friday (Mar 8) headlines popped up everywhere reporting that Russian scientists had found initial evidence of a new bacterial life form pulled up from the depths of Antarctica’s largest subglacial body of water, Lake Vostok. The discovery was viewed as extraordinary, and may have sealed the deal for Russia becoming the first country to discover a new species of bacteria in such an extreme location. However, new claims are...
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...
