Understanding tropical rainfall, both past and present
A recent study in Geophysical Research Letters proposes a new way to leverage signals contained in water molecules to decode the atmospheric processes that accompany changing tropical weather and climate patterns.
Cosmic ray telescope launches from Antarctica
Washington University in St. Louis announced that its SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument, which studies the origin of cosmic rays, successfully launched today from Williams Field at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
What a deep dive into the deep blue sea is teaching us
Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench. The work has important implications for the global water cycle, according to Douglas A. Wiens in Arts & Sciences.
Heavy metals control the ‘breath’ of wetlands
At the river’s edge, where water and soil meet, microbes churn out methane and other greenhouse gasses. Jeffrey G. Catalano, of Arts & Sciences, wades into local Missouri wetlands to determine the role of heavy metals in this process.
Field Notes | Azores, Portugal
Students in an undergraduate class in Arts & Sciences traveled to the remote Portuguese Azores archipelago to study field geology techniques in a rugged landscape shaped by volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates.
There and back again: Mantle xenon has a story to tell
Rita Parai, assistant professor of geochemistry in Arts & Sciences, constrains the history of volatile transport from the atmosphere into the deep Earth in a new publication in the journal Nature.
Bedrock in West Antarctica rising at surprisingly rapid rate
The findings, reported in the journal Science, contain positive implications for the survival of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which scientists had previously thought could be doomed because of the effects of climate change, according to study co-author Douglas Wiens of Arts & Sciences.
Flavor of the moment
In a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, Bhupal Dev, assistant professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how future accelerators could crash together charged particles in a new way to shed light on their behavior.
Is nature fundamentally weird?
Unlike everyday objects, quantum particles can be linked over long distances, behaving as one integrated whole, even though they are so widely separated they can’t communicate, even at the speed of light. Einstein hated the idea, which he called “spooky action at a distance.” Physicist Mark Alford explains the logic behind a famous experiment designed […]
Why is gravity so weak?
Scientists find gravity very puzzling. For one thing, they don’t understand why it is so weak; that is, why it takes so much stuff (like a planet’s worth) to generate much gravitational force. Perhaps, they say, it is leaking out of our universe. Physicist Adam Archibald, MA ’14, explains how this could be and describes an […]
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