Category Archives: Earth sciences
Hunting meteor fragments, older than the Earth
The minivan-sized meteorite that broke up over the Sierra on Sunday, April 22 was not just any old space rock. It was one of the rarest types of meteorites to fall to Earth — a carbonaceous chondrite, the earliest solid …
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Oaxaca earthquake, one day later
A major earthquake struck Mexico just after 11 a.m. Pacific Time yesterday. Initial reports put the magnitude at 7.9 and relatively close to the surface, which would be a very serious earthquake. However, news reports from Mexico City and then …
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Verosub teaches emergency response in Italy
Ken Verosub, Distinguished Professor in the geology department, spent two weeks in September in Pavia, Italy, teaching a short course on Earth Sciences and Natural Disasters in a masters program on risk and emergency management. (Photo: Verosub, center leads the …
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Nat Geo special features UC Davis Keck CAVES
A National Geographic Channel special feature, ‘X-Ray Earth,’ will air Tuesday, May 24 at 1 PM featuring work by UC Davis geophysicist Magali Billen and the Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences. Billen and the Keck CAVES are …
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Bizarre ‘traffic cone’ life in an Antarctic Lake
In an upcoming issue of the journal Geobiology, UC Davis geologist Dawn Sumner, Dale Andersen of the SETI Institute and colleagues will describe strange and unique life forms under the ice of Lake Untersee in Antarctica. They are stromatolites, a …
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Geological record holds clues to modern climate change, experts say
The distant past could hold clues to how the Earth’s future climate would respond in an environment with high levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report, written by a committee chaired …
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Students take part in national hot rocks power competition
A team of UC Davis undergraduate and graduate students is among 11 selected to take part in the first National Geothermal Student Competition, sponsored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies …
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Dating the first dinosaurs
Geologists from Argentina and the U.S. today announced a new dinosaur that roamed what is now South America 230 million years ago at the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs. The discovery, backed up by careful dating of dinosaur …
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New approaches to earthquake forecasting
In this interview with Thompson Reuters ScienceWatch, UC Davis interdisciplinary professor John Rundle talks about the new approaches that he and his collaborators have developed to understanding earthquakes over the past 20 years or so. Rather than treating them as …
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Going Viral with Kinect
Microsoft’s Kinect game controller, launched this month, is designed to let you control a video game with body movements. UC Davis computer science researcher Oliver Kreylos, however, has found out how to use the device to capture three-dimensional video on …
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