Southern
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Earth
Plutonium isotope anomaly discovered in Southern Hemisphere glaciers
Diagram showing the deposition of plutonium isotopes on the surface of a glacier. Credit: IFJ PAN The latest findings carried out by scientists at the PAN Institute for Nuclear Physics shed new light on the process by which plutonium isotopes accumulate in glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere. Analyzing samples of cryoconite, a sediment deposited in glaciers, not only reveals differences…
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Earth
Climate change will intensify drought in central and southern Europe in 2022, study finds
Soil moisture deviation (in standard deviation units) for the summer of 2022 compared to a normal summer. The pink dots indicate where 2022 was the driest summer since 1960. Credit: UFZ The drought, which lasted until the summer of 2022, was particularly severe, causing soils to become significantly drier in many parts of Europe. Public debate about the causes has…
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Biology
Scientists discover that Pacific southern killer whales have access to enough food, deepening the mystery of their struggle
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Two marine mammal scientists from the University of British Columbia have discovered that the claim that a lack of access to salmon is the cause of the plummeting population of killer whales in the southern Pacific Ocean is false. In a paper published on the open access site PLOS ONE, Burak Saigiri and Andrew Treitz discuss…
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Earth
El Niño Southern Oscillation caused temperature rise in 2023, research shows
El Niño and La Niña are warm and cold periods of the natural climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean, known as El Niño Southern Oscillation, or “ENSO” for short. This pattern changes erratically every two to seven years, causing predictable changes in ocean temperatures and disrupting normal wind and rain patterns across the tropics. These changes in the seasonal…
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Science
What lies behind the aurora borealis that brightens the southern sky more than usual?
The Northern Lights, also known as the Northern Lights, are visible in the sky near Knaresborough, England, on Friday, October 11, 2024. Credit: Andrew Hawkes via AP Another solar storm in a series of unusually strong solar storms to hit Earth filled areas farther south than usual, including parts of Germany, the United Kingdom, New England and New York City,…
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Earth
Clouds impeding the propagation of the Southern Annular Mode
Changes in CRE heating rate and zonal mean circulation index due to cloud lock-in. Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023JD040428 The Southern Annular Mode (SAM), characterized by an iconic bipolar zonal wind pattern around the storm track axis, is the most dominant mode of variability regulating weather and winds from the subtropics to the poles. Its origin,…
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