News by Subject Earth Science

Dong and colleagues studied well-preserved plant fossils from the Middle-Late Jurassic Daohugou Bed in eastern Inner Mongolia, northeastern China. These fossils closely resemble the extant catkin-yews Amentotaxus. They provide unequivocal evidence that the catkin-yews have undergone little morphological change over at least ~160 million years. Like ginkgo, the catkin-yews are living fossils that provide an important new example of evolutionary stasis.

A groundbreaking study is the first to analyze the relationship between group behaviors, group type, group dynamics, and kinship of beluga whales in 10 locations across the Arctic. Results show that not only do beluga whales regularly interact with close kin, including close maternal kin, they also frequently associate with more distantly related and unrelated individuals. Findings will improve the understanding of why some species are social, how individuals learn from group members and how animal cultures emerge.

New research explores how lower-latitude oceans drive complex changes in the Arctic Ocean, pushing the region into a new reality distinct from the 20th-century norm.

NASA's Aqua satellite revealed better organization and colder cloud top temperatures in Tropical Storm Cristina, indications that the storm was strengthening.

NASA used satellite data to create an animation of Fay's development and progression over the past few days, showing how the storm organized into a tropical storm. Additionally, NASA's Aqua satellite used infrared light to find the location of the strongest storms in Tropical Storm Fay occurring in the northeastern quadrant of the storm, mostly over the Atlantic Ocean.

Measurements by the GRACE-FO satellite mission show a decline in water storage in Central Europe by up to 94 percent compared with seasonal fluctuations. The changes are so serious that a recovery within one year is not to be expected. The water shortage in the years 2018 and 2019 is thus the largest in the entire GRACE and GRACE-FO measurement campaign of almost 20 years. The results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Perovskiet solar cells are at the center of much recent solar research. The material is cheap and almost as efficient as silicon. However, perovskite cells have a love-hate-relationship with the sun. The light they need to generate electricity, also impairs the quality of the cells, limiting efficiency and stability over time. Research at the Eindhoven University of Technology and universities in China and the US now sheds new light on the causes of this degradation.

New research reveals how winners & losers from climate change can be identified based on their ability to adapt to rising future temperatures. In the first study of its kind published in PNAS, Flinders University evolutionary biologists have shown that resilience or vulnerability to future climates is influenced by the thermal conditions of the climatic regions where species evolved.