News
June 26, 2015
Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are looking to create engineered organisms to eventually transform Mars into a more Earth-like planet hospitable to human life. The DARPA goal of terraforming the Red Planet includes plans to heat up and potentially thicken Mars’ atmosphere by planting and growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria and algae on the barren landscape, Vice Motherboard reports.
June 25, 2015
The International Conference on Geoethics is planned to be held in 3 segments: Prague-Pribram-Prague (Czech Republic) on October 9-19, 2015. It is expected to take objective standpoints to all main present neuralgic points of ethics and geoethics in the world in any liaison with the Earth sciences and with the needed improvement of ethical climate in Europe and in the world. Various new concepts outside main streams should be open for a discussion where constructive alternative solutions may help:
a) to accelerate the needed progress of the science;
June 24, 2015
The article “Flooding in river mouth: human caused or natural events? Five centuries of flooding events in the SW Netherlands, 1500-2000” has been published in “Hydrology and Earth system Sciences”, the interactive open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union. This paper looks into flood events of the past 500 years in the SW Netherlands, addressing the issue of what kind of flooding events have occurred and which ones have mainly natural causes and which ones are predominantly human induced.
June 19, 2015
U.S. mid-continent seismicity linked to high-rate injection wells
A dramatic increase in the rate of earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. since 2009 is associated with fluid injection wells used in oil and gas development, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the U.S. Geological Survey.
June 15, 2015
Seattle, 15 June, 2015 - Thirteen activists in kayaks have intercepted Shell's drilling rig, the Polar Pioneer, in Seattle's Puget Sound as the rig prepared to depart for the Arctic. The Greenpeace US activists have secured themselves together to block the Polar Pioneer’s departure while additional activists join the protests on the water nearby. In May, the Obama administration approved Shell’s plan to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea in the Alaskan Arctic. Since that approval, both Shell's rigs, the Polar Pioneer and the Noble Discoverer have failed routine inspections.
June 5, 2015
June 5 is the World environment day. For the last 100 years, the face of the Earth has been essentially changed by human activity. The fruits of our labour have been showed on a special website NASA “Images of change” where satellite photos taken with an interval of 5-10-50-100 years show Earth’s landscapes changes. The melting of glaciers, drying up of lakes, coastal erosion, desert approaching...
May 13, 2015
When Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. opened an office in Poland in 2009, it had a reason to be optimistic: the shale boom was transforming the U.S. into the world’s largest producer of natural gas. To the companies rushing to imitate that success in Europe, Poland looked like the next Texas.
Six years later, the U.K. explorer has yet to drill its first Polish well -- and that’s in the country that’s most eager to allow hydraulic fracturing in Europe. The so-called super-majors like Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc have packed up and moved on.
April 28, 2015
What's orange, white, and big all over—and a potential harbinger of big changes in the Arctic if not the whole planet? The answer is Goliat, a mammoth, beer-glass-shaped, floating oil platform that’s set to become the northernmost in the world. Last week the 65,000-ton rig arrived for commissioning near the remote Norwegian town of Hammerfest.
April 27, 2015
Nepal's devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake on Saturday was primed over 80 years ago by its last massive earthquake in 1934, which razed around a quarter of Kathmandu to the ground and killed over 17,000 people.
This latest quake follows the same pattern as a duo of big tremors that occurred over 700 years ago, and results from a domino effect of strain transferring along the fault, geologists say.
The researchers discovered the likely existence of this doublet effect only in recent weeks, during field work in the region.
April 26, 2015
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has taken its first stab at quantifying the hazard from earthquakes associated with oil and gas development. The assessment, released in a preliminary report today, identifies 17 areas in eight states with elevated seismic hazard. And geologists now say that such induced earthquakes could potentially be large, up to magnitude 7, which is big enough to cause buildings to collapse and widespread damage.