»geology«

Greenland is covered by roughly 2 million cubic kilometers of ice. That's enough to rise sea level by 7 meters, writes John Collins Rudolf in the NY Times (16.1.2007). He visits Greenland with a team of scientists and reports on the new phenomenon that ice and glaciers are retreating and give free new islands that were formerly bound to the glacier. Its a dramatic effect of global warming and challenges cartographers which have to redraw maps, "geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created," writes Rudolf. Greenland loses 240 cubic kilometers ice each year, and that's three times the volume of all glaciers of the Alps.

William Broad writes in the NY Times (9.1.2007) about geologists projecting plate tectonics into the future. In several million year's time the Mediterranean will have vanished, the place of Los Angeles will have passed San Fransisco far into the North. Later, all continents will merge into a super continent called Pangea Ultima. Includes nice multimedia stuff.

As William Broad reports in the NY Times (7.11.2006) there's a dispute among scientists -- involving geologists and paleoclimatologists -- on how much shifting CO2 levels some 150 or 440 million years ago induced climate change events. Surprisingly, there's now lot of data available to study this period in more detail. But scientists disagree whether, for instance, an increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is responsible for a then global warming phase. A preliminary conclusion, both sides may draw, is that climate science is more complex than thought.

The dispute shall not distract from the fact (or the present scientific consensus) that today's man-made increase in CO2 levels will yield climate change.

It's a rare occasion, but sometimes it happens: Although northern Germany is -- seismologically spoken -- a quite region, in recent decades little earthquakes of magnitude 3 to 5 occurred. Horst Radermacher investigates for FAZ (5.4.2006) potential causes, and especially whether natural gas exploitation may be tracked down as a cause. A recent talk by a seismologist of a government-run institution opted for gas extraction as promoting earthquakes, however, he didn't anticipated the huge public response on the issue.