Lifeboat Foundation

New geological dating system could show when glaciers retreated.

But competitor to the tried-and-true lightning rod is ungodly expensive.

New information about an emerging technique that could track microplastics from space has been uncovered by researchers at the University of Michigan. It turns out that satellites are best at spotting soapy or oily residue, and microplastics appear to tag along with that residue.

Microplastics—tiny flecks that can ride ocean currents hundreds or thousands of miles from their point of entry—can harm sea life and marine ecosystems, and they’re extremely difficult to track and clean up. However, a 2021 discovery raised the hope that satellites could offer day-by-day timelines of where microplastics enter the water, how they move and where they tend to collect, for prevention and clean-up efforts.

Continue reading “Tracking ocean microplastics from space” »

Five hundred million years before the dawn of dinosaurs, strange animals ruled a frozen planet.

Here is something new from Earth’s interiors.

A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) has found a new layer under Earth’s crust called “melt,” according to a press release. It comprises hot molten rocks and reveals useful insights about our planet’s tectonic plate activity.

Interestingly, these plates are constantly moving, and their movement is linked to the occurrence of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Moreover, tectonic motion is so powerful; that it could also lead to the formation of new mountain ranges and even new continents.

Continue reading “Melt: Scientists discover a new molten layer under Earth’s crust” »

Hurricane Sandy was an extreme weather event. But a Stanford-Colorado State AI forecasts accelerated warming with a high probability of future Sandys.

An AI neural network studies historical maps and data to accurately predict a rise of 1.1 C by 2022, 1.5 by the mid-2030s, and 2.0 by 2050.

Cyanobacteria are single-celled organisms that derive energy from light, using photosynthesis to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) and liquid water (H₂O) into breathable oxygen and the carbon-based molecules like proteins that make up their cells. Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to perform photosynthesis in the history of Earth, and were responsible for flooding the early Earth with oxygen, thus significantly influencing how life evolved.

Geological measurements suggest that the atmosphere of the early Earth—over three billion years ago—was likely rich in CO₂, far higher than current levels caused by anthropogenic climate change, meaning that ancient cyanobacteria had plenty to “eat.”

But over Earth’s multi-billion-year history, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have decreased, and so to survive, these bacteria needed to evolve new strategies to extract CO₂. Modern cyanobacteria thus look quite different from their ancient ancestors, and possess a complex, fragile set of structures called a CO₂-concentrating mechanism (CCM) to compensate for lower concentrations of CO₂.

Few of us give much thought to Earth’s swirling, spinning contents until some sudden movement, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, jolts us to our senses.

Geoscientists, though, are a little more clued into the dynamics of Earth’s guts, and have just discovered that Earth’s solid inner iron core – which usually spins within a near-frictionless molten outer envelope – appears to have slowed to a grinding halt.

Before anybody panics and searches for a copy of a terrible 20-year-old science fiction movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, it’s not the first time record of such an event. It’s not even the first in recent history.

NASA has a massive amount of data and it receives more every day. While some of the data is processed immediately, much of the data is archived to be processed later, sometimes years later. This situation needs to change if researchers are to utilize the data to investigate critical issues with dynamically changing characteristics like global climate change. To increase its ability to process and use this data in a timely manner, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center announced a joint development program with IBM Research to process the NASA data using IBM’s foundation AI technology.

To put this task into perspective, the GPT-3 data set, which led to the development of ChatGPT AI platform that recently passed a Wharton MBA exam, represents about 45TB (terabytes) of data. By comparison, NASA estimates that its data set could be upwards of 250PB (petabytes). With 1PB equal to 1,000TB, the NASA data set is over 5,000 times larger than the GPT-3 data set, making this a monumental task, but the benefits could be ground-breaking.

Previously, IBM estimated that 90% of data collected is never used, and in their press invitation, IBM and NASA noted that “Currently, half of all scientific findings come from archived data, which makes it challenging for researchers to study ever-evolving threats such as climate change.” Efficiently mining the enormous amount of archival data needs the power of AI. IBM Research’s massive cloud resources, the collective experiences of the company’s AI experts, and its AI foundation model technology will help NASA filter and analyze earth-science data in days or months rather than years or even decades.