Judgment of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of Raghubir Singh Garia Vs State of Uttarakhand & Others dated 22/04/2025. The matter related to illegal mining of soap stone in village Papon, District Bageshwar, Uttarakhand. The complainant, a resident of the village said that illegal mining of soap stone …
a new method presented by Paul Wessel and Loren W Kroenke at a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union offers a way to locate hot spots under the ocean more easily and precisely than ever before ( Scientific American, Vol 276, No 4). Described as hot-spotting, the technique depends …
scientists in Britain and Germany studying fossilised protozoans in the Southern Atlantic believe that ocean currents in Antarctica may have triggered regular growth spurts in Arctic ice sheets over the past 14,0000 years. This finding may lead to better predictions of the rate of global warming (New Scientist, Vol 154, …
Dust and fungal spores thrown up during earthquakes can cause respiratory infections, say researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, US. Three years after a quake in the north of Los Angeles, people have been suffering from respiratory problems. Researchers found that inhaling airborne spores of …
the Alps, the Himalaya and the Caucasus mountains once formed part of an unbroken chain of a mountain range some 40 to 45 million years ago. According to two Australian geologists, this colossal mountain range stretched all the way from Spain, through Asia, to the southwest Pacific, may be as …
earthquakes round the world are dragging the North Pole towards Japan. It has been discovered by Giorgio Spada of the University of Bologna, Italy, that the largest of the quakes, most of which occur along the Pacific rim, tend to tilt the pole towards their epicentres. This finding is a …
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, US, recently launched a new weather satellite GOES-K to gear up for the busy Atlantic hurricane season. The National Weather Service (NWS) now relies on two geostationary operational environmental satellites for forecasting: GOES-8 for the east coast and GOES-9 for the west. But both …
it could be the splash of the century and with disastrous results. The Kilauea volcano in Hawaii - 20 km long, 10 km wide and 9 km deep - is sinking into the Pacific Ocean at 7 cm a second. The volcano, one of the most active in the world, …
Two physicists claim that dark matter making up as much as 99 per cent of the universe, may have changed the course of life on earth. Samar Abbas and Asfar Abbas of the Institute of Physics at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar (Orissa), suggest that the earth might haw encountered dense …
Recent research into understanding the genesis of oceanic crusts shows that crust formation is not equally vigorous everywhere. In Iceland, where the mid-ocean ridge emerges above sea level, new crust is more than 15 km thick. At the other extreme, some ridges lie beneath 5,000 metres of water but have …
IN 1996, Kerala, considered a seismically safe zone, witnessed a tremor of magnitude 2.8 (on the Richter scale). This is not 4D isolated case, for the state has lately been seeing an increase in the frequency of tremors in its central and southern parts. Studies by C P Rajendran and …
A CHUNK of the earth's crust off Canada's west coast is beginning to disappear, says a report by North American geologists. The fragment, known as the 'Explorer plate', is fusing with its neighbouring plates to form a new plate boundary and will cease to exist independently. This is the first …
OVER the years, parts of the ocean floor have been sinking below the surface in the stately cycle of plate tectonics. But where do these great slabs of oceanic plate go, and what happens to them inside the earth? Some geologists have suggested that the mantle is divided into two …
stromatolites, considered to be the most abundant fossils in rocks representing the first two to three billion years of Earth's history, may not be fossils at all. Instead, they could very well be just fossil-like structures, as revealed by the recent findings of John Grotzinger and Daniel Rothman of the …
life existed on Earth 350 million years earlier than everyone predicted, says a researcher in California, us. It was a time when the planet was still being bombarded by meteors. Gustaf Arrhenius of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, us, claims that 3.85 billion-year-old rocks from Greenland contained …
Volcanic eruptions normally release molten lava, water vapour and hot gases. But the Galeras volcano in Colombia is one with a difference. It spits out gold dissolved in its dense mix of gases; this gold melts out as magma from crustal rocks hundreds of miles beneath the surface. Fraser Goff, …
in view of a recent discovery, the models used to estimate earth's response to climate change stand for a rethink. While studying the effect of marine life on global warming, scientists found that the role of oceans in carbon fixation had actually been overestimated. The new findings suggest that half …
