EGU 2008 in the media

Sunday, 13 April 2008

Page 2 of 7 Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Vienna   Visions of Sun's great 'belches' 15 April 2008 Nasa's Stereo orbiters have captured stunning new images of spaceborne debris thrown out from the Sun. The twin spacecraft have seen Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) hurling material into a comet, ripping off its tail. Scientists hope the probes will allow better forecasting of CMEs, which sometimes disrupt communication systems on Earth. The research was presented at a major science and environment conference in Vienna. Read more... Forecast for big sea level rise 15 April 2008 Sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half metres by the end of this century, according to a new scientific analysis. This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year's landmark assessment of climate science. Sea level rise of this magnitude would have major impacts on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh. The findings were presented at a major science conference in Vienna. Read more... Plants 'thrive' on Moon rock diet 17 April 2008 Scientists with the European Space Agency (Esa) say the day when flowers bloom on the Moon has come closer. An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food. Some see growing plants on the Moon as a step towards human habitation. But the concept is not an official aim of Esa, and one of the agency's senior officials has dismissed the idea as “science fiction”. The new research was presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, the largest annual European gathering of scientists studying the Earth, its climate and its neighbours in space.  Read more... Titan: Treasures of Earth's oily twin 16 April 2008 If worlds have shadow twins elsewhere in the Universe, then Earth's would appear to lie just a block or two down the cosmic road, in orbit around Saturn. "We have on Titan many of the geological features that we find on Earth," enthuses Rosaly Lopes. "We find volcanism, we find tectonics, we find erosion and deposition, and wind activity forming dunes. "It's very similar to the Earth." But there is a crucial difference: Titan is so cold that most of the water is solid. The rivers flowing across these plains are formed of a hydrocarbon soup with methane as its main ingredient. The true nature of this once mysterious world is now finally emerging, courtesy largely of the Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint US-European venture, which deposited a landing craft on Titan, and continues to send back data and pictures of Saturn, its rings and its 60-odd moons. Dr Lopes, from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, is one of the scientists reviewing the Titan findings at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, Europe's largest annual gathering of scientists studying the Earth, its climate and its cosmic neighbourhood. Four years after its arrival in the Saturnian system, Cassini is now showing researchers just how similar Titan is to our own planet.  Read more...     << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next > End >>