by Caitrin Pilkington, April 6, 2017
Extraordinary images are now coming from the Newfoundland and Labrador town, where the snow is high enough to cover doors and windows completely. More than 135 cm of snow has fallen on the town of Gander, Nfld., over the past week after it was hit with two back-to-back Nor’easters.
To put that precipitation in perspective, Torontonians can expect around 115 cm of snow in an entire year.
by Ron Clutz, April 5, 2017
The recent El Nino is cooling down as shown clearly in both sea surface temperatures and lower troposphere air temperatures. The two relevant data sets are UAH v.6 and HadSSTv3.1 now provide averages for the month of March 2017.
by Florida State University, March 15, 2017
New research suggests that inorganic chemicals can self-organize into complex structures that mimic primitive life on Earth.This complicates the identification of Earth’s earliest microfossils and redefines the search for life on other planets and moons.
All known Ediacaran skeletal biota produced either aragonite or high-Mg calcite: carbonate polymorphs interpreted to have been favoured by ambient seawater chemistry. Indeed all known Ediacaran skeletal taxa were immobile benthos found exclusively in shallow marine carbonate settings. Finally, we note that Ediacaran skeletal taxa are of diverse affinity, and some possessed a non-mineralized, organic, counterpart, as detailed below
by Warren Blair, April 7, 2017
The unusually high Esperanza temperature is likely the result of a strong jet stream that brought a strong ridge of high pressure over the Antarctic Peninsula, allowing warm air from South America to push southwards over Antarctica. Antarctic sea ice was at record-highs in 2014 and again in 2015 when modern records were shattered.