Laboratory investigation of a deformed 1834 William IV sixpence - npj Heritage Science - Nature

Dying corals may have found an unexpected lifeline: their neighbours. Scientists at Stanford University have discovered a way to bring corals back from the brink of death by placing them in contact with healthy corals for just a few days.

The Value of Long-Term Data at Headwater Sites While the value of monitoring is sometimes underrecognized, according to Shanley, long-term datasets gain value each year because they track environmental changes and unexpected disturbances. “The long-term streamflow, water quality, snow, and precipitation datasets provide immense value to those who wish to better understand environmental changes. Monitoring programs allow you to study and see how things react,” USGS hydrologist Serena Matt said. “They not only inform policy, but they also reveal when policy changes have succeeded.” For instance, without 30-year long-term precipitation and chemistry data sets, scientists would not have measured the distinct drop of sulfate in rainwater in the SRRW as a result of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The isolated location of Sleepers, far from any acid rain source, makes it an ideal ecosystem for study. Despite being a pristine, forested area, in the early 1990s Sleepers had high levels of sulfate in its rainwater, a characteristic of acid rain formed from air pollution miles away.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.