News in Brief: Earth/Environment
Gassy lakes
Volcanic lakes could be burping out more than one-third as much
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as full-fledged volcanoes. To
understand the planets total carbon budget, researchers need to
account for all natural sources of carbon dioxide. But until now,
no one had looked at lakes within volcanic craters, which can
contain high levels of dissolved gases. Scientists from Spains
Institute of Technology and Renewable Energy and colleagues
surveyed these lakes and report online February 3 in
Geology that they emit some 117 million tons of carbon
dioxide annually. Alexandra Witze
Road woes
Hearing hurricanes
Seismometers set up to detect earthquakes might also capture
rumbles from distant hurricanes, providing a new way to study past
storms, a new study suggests. Scientists from Northwestern
University in Evanston, Ill., found seismic signals from 1992s
Hurricane Andrew, a category-5 storm that walloped Florida, in
records from a seismic monitoring station in Harvard, Mass. Because
researchers dont have complete data on how strong and frequent
Atlantic hurricanes were before satellites started observing in the
1960s, using historical seismic records could help identify earlier
hurricanes, the team writes in the February issue of the
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. Such
data could help scientists better understand whether hurricanes are
becoming more frequent and/or stronger as sea-surface temperatures
rise. Alexandra Witze
Road woes
Living close to heavily traveled roads raises the risk of
developing asthma and allergies in children. Teenagers who live
within 100 meters of the main thoroughfare in a suburb of Lima,
Peru, were twice as likely to have asthma symptoms as kids living
more than 384 meters from the road, an international team led by
researchers at Johns Hopkins University report online January 18 in
the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. And the
closer children lived to the busy street, the higher was their risk
of having allergies, the researchers found. Tina Hesman
Saey
How old is the Grand Canyon?
Brian Wernicke of Caltech believes the Grand Canyon to be older
than the prevailing estimate of 5 or 6 million years much older. In
a paper published online January 26 in the Geological Society
of America Bulletin, he argues that it started forming 70
million to 80 million years ago. His controversial evidence: the
thermal histories of its rocks, as well as recently discovered
zircon minerals suggesting that a river was in the right place at
the right time to do the carving. Devin Powell
SOURCE