OCEANS
For the first time, the depth-sounding information from every research vessel worldwide has been painstakingly compiled into one high-resolution global grid. The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans can now be used to generate customised seafloor maps of any region. More details are available at .
EARTHQUAKES
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Aristotle observed that there seem to be more earthquakes at night. It turns out he is right – in Greece at least. Andreas Tzanis from the University of Athens looked at three years of Greek quakes and found they were 10 per cent more likely to happen at night. He suspects this has to do with the Sun’s effect on electromagnetic fields in the ground. Strangely, he found the opposite effect in neighbouring Turkey.
LAKES
The biggest lakes ever seen on the planet were in Russia 90,000 years ago, according to Jan Mangerud from the University of Bergen, Norway. Three giant lakes, each containing up to 15,000 cubic kilometres of water, formed on the Arctic coast when ice dammed up the outflow of three large rivers.
HIMALAYAS
The world is about 5 °C colder than it would be if the Himalayas didn’t exist, says Yves Godderis from the Paul-Sabatier University in Toulouse. He modelled the break up of granite by wind and rain to find how quickly the rock absorbs the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. This alone cooled the world 2.6 °C over the past 30 million years, he says. Burial of plant matter by monsoon rains created by the mountains should have about the same cooling effect again.
MARS
The first year of data from NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has revealed patches of bare bedrock on the planet’s flat surface. That’s good news for geologists who hope to send astronauts or robots to chip away at Martian rocks, as many researchers had feared the ground would be covered by metres of dust, making such hard-rock geology a difficult task.
