Increasingly severe wildfires at high elevations are impacting snowpack—an important reservoir for the U.S. West. The altered landscape makes it more challenging to predict when snow will melt and how much water will be ...
Environment
Sep 20, 2024
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In a temperate montane forest in southern Québec, all is quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, you'll see the landscape has a story to tell. Waterloo plant ecologist Dr. Julie Messier, alongside her collaborators from Sherbrooke, ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 18, 2024
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Heat waves are generally thought to occur in hot, lowland regions—but what happens when extreme heat strikes the frigid, high-altitude Tibetan Plateau? Is the definition of a heat wave the same at 5,000 meters above sea ...
Environment
Sep 10, 2024
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Here at UT, we've had several stories that describe the concept of a space elevator. They are designed to make it easier to get objects off Earth and into space. That, so far, has proven technically or economically infeasible, ...
Space Exploration
Sep 10, 2024
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31
Human disturbance has altered the integrity and functionality of forests throughout the globe, with the greatest impact on regions characterized by historical human cultural development and long-term natural resource exploitation. ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 5, 2024
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As North America heats up due to climate change, animals are responding in three primary ways: moving north, heading to higher elevations and making phenological changes—adjusting annual cycles such as when they breed.
Plants & Animals
Sep 4, 2024
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The Colorado River and its tributaries provide water for hydropower, irrigation and drinking water in seven U.S. states and Mexico. Much of this water comes from the snowpack that builds up over the winter and then melts ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 16, 2024
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Clouds have for decades been a bugbear for remote sensing of land surface temperature—one of the most important earth system metrics, used in everything from tracking climate change to predicting wildfires. A new approach ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 6, 2024
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In studying data collected from NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission, which in 2022 sent a spacecraft to intentionally collide with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, the mission's science team has discovered ...
Astronomy
Jul 30, 2024
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179
Scientists have known from ice core research that it's easier to melt an ice sheet than to freeze it up again. Now, they know at least part of the reason why, and it has to do with ice's "sponginess," according to a new study ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 25, 2024
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The elevation of a geographic location is its height above a fixed reference point[citation needed], most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface (see Geodetic system, vertical datum). Elevation, or geometric height, is mainly used when referring to points on the Earth's surface, while altitude or geopotential height is used for points above the surface, such as an aircraft in flight or a spacecraft in orbit, and depth is used for points below the surface.
Less commonly, elevation is measured using the center of the Earth as the reference point. Due to equatorial bulge, there is debate as to which of the summits of Mt. Everest or Chimborazo is at the higher elevation, as the Chimborazo summit is further from the Earth's center while the Mt. Everest summit is higher above mean sea level.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
