The end-Ordovician mass extinction, killing roughly 86% of all marine species, is now linked to nutrient-driven anoxia in the global ocean. This marine catastrophe has previously been attributed to a cooling event of a warm Earth, as a glacier can be seen to grow on the South Pole, and to increased oxygen in the ocean. [...]

In 16 years of data observations, the Solar Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO) — a joint European Space Agency and NASA mission –- made an unexpected claim for fame: the sighting of new comets at an alarming rate. SOHO has spotted over 2100 comets, most of which are from what’s known as the Kreutz family, which graze [...]

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have directly determined the surface temperature of early Mars for the first time, providing evidence that’s consistent with a warmer and wetter Martian past. By analyzing carbonate minerals in a four-billion-year-old meteorite that originated near the surface of Mars, the scientists determined that the minerals formed at [...]

One of the supposedly best understood and least interesting landscapes on Mars is hiding something that could rewrite the planet’s history. Or not. In fact, about all that is certain is that decades of assumptions regarding the wide, flat Hesperia Planum are not holding up very well under renewed scrutiny with higher-resolution, more recent spacecraft [...]

Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists recently used long-term data from the Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory (Coweeta) in Western North Carolina to examine the feasibility of managing forests for water supply under the changing weather conditions forecast for the future. Published in the September issue of the journal Ecological Applications, the analysis examines the interactions [...]

The world’s eyes are on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) headed toward re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The satellite is currently predicted to re-enter sometime on the afternoon of Friday, September 23, 2011, but it hasn’t been easy to precisely determine the path and pace of UARS despite the fact that scientists well understand how [...]

NASA’s Aqua and TRMM satellites were on guard when Tropical Storm Nate developed late in the day yesterday, Sept. 7 in the Bay of Campeche near the east coast of Mexico. The satellites measured cloud height, temperature and rainfall rates and found the heaviest rainfall on the southern side of the tropical storm. The Atmospheric [...]

The Arizona State University team that oversees the imaging system on board NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has released the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 sites, more clearly showing the paths made when the astronauts explored these areas. The higher resolution of these images is possible because of [...]