News by Subject Earth Science

Conditions inside the Shiveluch volcano include roughly 10%-14% water by weight (wt%), according to research from Washington University in St. Louis. Most volcanoes have less than 1% water. For subduction zone volcanoes, the average is usually 4%, rarely exceeding 8 wt%, which is considered superhydrous.

Human activities might have shifted the movement of caribou in and near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to scientists who tracked them using isotopic analysis from shed antlers. The study is timely given the auction this year of oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Indigenous Alaskans opposed the leases, arguing development could disrupt the migration of caribou they depend on for sustenance.

Humans cooperate with each other in large groups to defend territories or wage war. But what underlies the evolution of this kind of cooperation? Researchers at the Max PIanck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard University show that there may be a link between social bonds and participation in large-scale cooperation: Chimpanzees join their close bond partners when fighting rivals. In humans, too, social bonds may have been essential to the evolution of cooperative abilities.

It is now the third year that gray whales have been found in very poor condition or dead in large numbers along the west coast of Mexico, USA and Canada, and scientist have raised their concerns. An international study published this week in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, led by Aarhus University researcher Dr Fredrik Christiansen, suggests that starvation is contributing to these mortalities.

In a study published today in Science Advances, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa oceanographers fully reconciled climate and carbon cycle trends of the past 50 million years--solving a controversy debated in the scientific literature for decades.

In a new study an international team of researchers examined three-dimensional digital models of the bones, joints, and muscles of the fins and limbs of two extinct early tetrapods and a closely related fossil fish and discover these early tetrapods had a very distinct pattern of muscle leverage that didn't look like a fish fin or modern tetrapod limbs and their limbs were more adapted for propulsion rather than weight bearing.