Over geologic time scales, seawater transforms the basalt of the ocean floor by chemical attack. At the end of this alteration process, the basalt turns partly into clays and partly into dissolved salts in sea water. Lithium, a chemical element initially contained in basalt, will then be distributed between clay and seawater. This separation has […]
It is widely accepted that low carbon technologies will contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly those coming from carbon dioxide, and thus slow down the global warming. That’s why most of the largest economies in the world have committed to reduce their gas emissions by supporting an unprecedented transition from the current fossil-fuel based […]
The Unknown Continent, t he White Desert. In the past only few -and brav e- people, such as Shackleton, Amundsen or Scott, dared to explore Antarctica. Nevertheless, in the fifties scientists started thinking that it was a very interesting place for doing research, due to its unique conditions, and started building more and more stations […]
Jones is a small city located in the state of Oklahoma, in the Central United States. In Science Magazine we can read that the town has one bar, three restaurants and nine churches. It looks like the perfect place for a truly peaceful holiday, doesn’t it? Too bad that our perception of Jones’s tranquility can […]
Is it possible to have an asymmetric magnetic field when all boundary conditions are known to be symmetric? The question seems awkward but the counter-intuitive reality is always there to make Science far more interesting, as revealed recently by Hao Cao and collaborators . Today’s story is a good combination of intriguing observations and amazing […]
Climate change due to global warming is usually presented as the Nemesis of our civilization. Day by day, evidences supporting temperature and sea level raise are presented. Numerical models point that CO2 concentration will lead to a new climate not very human friendly in what can be taken as the fastest ever climate change. Still […]
Let me tell you a story about serendipity in research , a story that involves the evolution of Earth’s landscape and floods of unprecedented scale. This is related to research of our own group here at CSIC . Classical authors such as Aristotle, Galileo, or Leonardo da Vinci, used to describe the birth of the […]
What keeps Earth-scientists busy? The present list aims at summarizing the most relevant open problems addressed by geoscientists nowadays. Some of these 49 open questions are recent; others have been standing unanswered for centuries. They cover from the early stages of the Earth to the present or near future threats; from the deeper interior of […]
Locations with an extreme climate are more sensitive to changes in the global conditions. We could say that such places live in the razor’s edge, where a subtle change makes the difference between life and death. A good laboratory for testing those ideas is Greenland. Once settled by Norsemen and Icelanders, at the end of […]
News on global warming and sea-level rise flood our daily life. Even a modest decimeter increase of the current sea level will affect millions of people . Despite this gloomy scenario, we lack precise models to predict sea level changes during glacial and interglacial periods, such as the one in which we now live. As […]