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At first glance it looks like a potato-shaped asteroid flying through space. But this multi-coloured image is actually the Earth - and shows how gravity varies on different parts of the globe. The images were unveiled today by the team behind the GOCE satellite at a conference in Munich and are the most accurate ever released. The 'geoid' map, as it is known, is used to illustrate how oceans would look in the absence of currents or tides. The bright yellow colours show gravity at its strongest, while it is at its weakest in the blue areas. There appears to...

As pollution from burning fossil fuels continues to heat the atmosphere, the world's glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate. Scientists widely agree that this meltwater has been a major factor in raising global sea levels about seven inches over the 20th century. The movement of all that water is affecting the Earth's rotation, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science. "If you are melting glaciers from high latitudes--in Alaska, Greenland, or Iceland--you move mass away from the pole, toward the equator, which slows the Earth down," said Jerry Mitrovica, the study's lead author and a Harvard...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear...But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America...and routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain?...... Never mind that the scientific community is divided over what causes global warming, how bad it is and how to deal with it. Gore plays Chicken Little to the media’s applause, insisting that the world...

A research team led by scientists in Taiwan and [Red] China announced on August 21, 2018, that Earth’s protective magnetic field has undergone relatively rapid shifts in the past, including one lasting just two centuries. That’s fast in contrast to the thousands of years thought to be needed for a magnetic pole reversal, an event whereby magnetic south becomes magnetic north and vice versa. Such an event might leave Earth with a substantially reduced magnetic field for some unknown period of time, exposing our world to dangerous effects from the sun. If it occurred in today’s world of ubiquitous electric...

Over the course of the past 200 million years, our planet has experienced four major geological periods (the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous and Cenozoic) and one major ice age (the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation), all of which had a drastic impact on plant and animal life, as well as effecting the course of species evolution. For decades, geologists have also understood that these changes are due in part to gradual shifts in the Earth’s orbit, which are caused by Venus and Jupiter, and repeat regularly every 405,000 years. But it was not until recently that a team of geologists and Earth scientists...

The Earth has a second magnetic field, one generated by ocean currents. Researchers know little about it, but images captured by satellites show this invisible force generated by the world’s salty oceans in perfect detail. ... ESA released a video detailing the changes in the Earth’s magnetic field over a 24-hour period... ...“It’s a really tiny magnetic field. It’s about 2-2.5 nanotesla at satellite altitude, which is about 20,000 times weaker than the Earth’s global magnetic field.”... Oceans may have a small contribution to the magnetic field that protects the planet from harmful cosmic rays, but it remains to be...

New research shows the most significant weakening is happening under Africa which has been dubbed the 'South Atlantic Anomaly' (SAA). As well as giving us our north and south poles, the magnetic field blankets the Earth, protecting it from solar winds and cosmic radiation. The forcefield has weakened significantly over the past 160 years and scientists now suggest it could be in the process of flipping. Such a change would be a switch in magnetic polarity and would see compasses point south rather than north. Scientists believe such an occurrence has actually happened several times in the history of our...

At first blush, Frank Klein is another distinguished veteran in a military town full of them. But the 96-year-old retired U.S. Air Force colonel can also lay claim to a special footnote in history. In addition to being a decorated officer and skilled navigator, he’s the man who helped redefine where north was. The Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, native’s journey to his footnote was a circuitous one. Following high school, he had a mind to go into acting and actually moved to New York City. For a year he had a role on a weekly CBS radio program, where he would rub...

NASA has revealed that a massive hole, measuring more than ten per cent of the Sun's surface area, has opened up on our star. ... NASA says the huge hole is actually not of great concern, but it remains unclear why the coronal holes actually form. ..

Assumed to be caused by random fluctuations in the circulation of the molten iron core, the flips may actually be tied to what's going on at Earth's surface. At times in the geologic past when landmasses have bunched together on one side of the equator, the Earth's magnetic field has begun flipping soon thereafter... "What we see clearly is that the surface positions of the continents are linked with the frequency of the reversals," says group member François Pétrélis, a geophysicist at the French research agency CNRS in Paris... Computer simulations have shown how molten iron in the spinning core...

In our planet's early history, 720 to 640 million years ago, thick sheets of ice covered the majority of the surface, as the Earth was locked in a deep freeze. But explosive underwater volcanoes changed the chemistry of the Earth's oceans and were key to breaking the planet from its icy state, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Southampton believe underwater volcanoes helped to thaw out "Snowball Earth", and even led to runaway chemical chain reactions, which created the conditions for an explosion of life on Earth. While much of the driving forces behind glaciation during...

Why should be we worried about a polarity flip? The magnetic field protects us from harmful solar radiations and cosmic rays. If these start fading away, it may affect every living creature on Earth. An increase in radiation exposure may not only lead to serious health outcomes, but also some genetic disorders could occur. Some biologists even fear that direct exposure to harmful solar radiations may result in mass extinctions. Not only could some severe health consequence fallow the weakening of magnetic field. In a less concerning outcome, but still very worrisome it could lead to a severe disturbance in...

There have been many estimates for when the earth's inner core was formed, but scientists from the University of Liverpool have used new data which indicates that the Earth's inner core was formed 1 -- 1.5 billion years ago as it "froze" from the surrounding molten iron outer core. . . . . In a new study published in Nature, researchers from the University's School of Environmental Sciences analysed magnetic records from ancient igneous rocks and found that there was a sharp increase in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field between 1 and 1.5 billion years ago. This increased...

Ice Age Magnetic Reversal Was Global Event And Linked With Super Volcano Eruption And Rapid Climate Variability, Says New Research October 17, 2012 in Geology & Climate During the last ice age, around 41,000 years ago, there was a very rapid and complete reversal of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, according to new research. There was already localized evidence of polarity reversals during this time, but with the new research, the theory that it was a global event is now strongly supported. And very interestingly, it is one that nearly coincided with the very fast, short-term climate variability of the last...

An experiment conducted has revealed an unlikely behavior in a class of materials called frustrated magnets, addressing a long-debated question about the nature of these discontented quantum materials. The researchers tested the frustrated magnets -- so-named because they should be magnetic at low temperatures but aren't -- to see if they exhibit a behavior called the Hall Effect. When a magnetic field is applied to an electric current flowing in a conductor such as a copper ribbon, the current deflects to one side of the ribbon. This deflection, first observed in 1879 by E.H. Hall, is used today in sensors...

“Magnetic reconnection is one of the most important drivers of space weather events,” said Jeff Newmark, interim director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Eruptive solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms all involve the release, through reconnection, of energy stored in magnetic fields. Space weather events can affect modern technological systems such as communications networks, GPS navigation, and electrical power grids.” The four MMS have been stacked on top of one another like pancakes, encapsulated in the payload fairing, transported to the launch pad, hoisted and mated to the top of the 195-foot-tall rocket.

Scientists say they have gained new insight into what lies at the very centre of the Earth. Research from China and the US suggests that the innermost core of our planet has another, distinct region at its centre. The team believes that the structure of the iron crystals there are different from those found in the outer part of the inner core. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Geoscience. Without being able to drill into the heart of the Earth, its make-up is something of a mystery. So instead, scientists use echoes generated by earthquakes to study...

A magnetic field shift is old news. Around 800,000 years ago, magnetic north hovered over Antarctica and reindeer lived in magnetic south. The poles have flipped several times throughout Earth's history. Scientists have estimated that a flip cycle starts with the magnetic field weakening over the span of a few thousand years, then the poles flip and the field springs back up to full strength again. However, a new study shows that the last time the Earth's poles flipped, it only took 100 years for the reversal to happen. The Earth's magnetic field is in a weakening stage right now....

Searching for a pot of gold? Try the center of the Earth. More than 99 percent of Earth's gold is missing—it all sank to the center of the planet billions of years ago. In fact, says geologist Bernard Wood of Macquarie University in Australia, there's enough gold in Earth's core to coat its surface in 1.5 feet of the stuff. How did it get there? Earth formed from a series of smaller planetesimals that crashed together over the course of 30 million to 40 million years. Wood deduced how much gold ought to be present in Earth's crust by comparing...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...