| | News reports |  |
| | | 1390/11/19 |  Mars Express Radar Yields Strong Evidence of Ocean That Once Covered Part of Red Planet | NGDIR News Section--ScienceDaily-- ESA's Mars Express has returned strong evidence for an ocean once covering part of Mars. Using radar, it has detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor within the boundaries of previously identified, ancient shorelines on Mars.
The MARSIS radar was deployed in 2005 and has been collecting data ever since. Jérémie Mouginot, Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) and the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues have analysed more than two years of data and found that the northern plains are covered in low-density material.
"We interpret these as sedimentary deposits, maybe ice-rich," says Dr Mouginot. "It is a strong new indication that there was once an ocean here."
The existence of oceans on ancient Mars has been suspected before and features reminiscent of shorelines have been tentatively identified in images from various spacecraft. But it remains a controversial issue.
Two oceans have been proposed:..............[ More] |
|
| | |  | 1390/11/12 | | Assessing the Success of Surface Coal Mine Reclamation | NGDIR News Section-- Peabody Energy, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is the world's largest private-sector coal company, with more than 100 years of history. The company's coal products fuel 10 percent of all US electricity and 2 percent of worldwide electricity. Peabody Western Coal Company (PWCC), a subsidiary of Peabody Energy, operates the Kayenta Mine in northeastern Arizona. A significant portion of the company's coal derives from surface mining, which involves disturbing overlying r.....[ More] | |
| | 1390/11/05 | | What Makes New York's Shawangunk Mountains One of the "Last Great Places"? | NGDIR News Section-- Due to its rich biological diversity, New York State's Shawangunk Mountains region is one of the most important sites for conservation in the northeastern United States. Because of the many rare natural communities and species found here, the New York Natural Heritage Program ranked the Shawangunks highest in biological diversity, and The Nature Conservancy recognized them as one of the "last great places" on earth. The northern Shawangunk Mountains support 42 state rare spe.....[ More] | |
| | 1390/10/28 | | Computer Simulation Models for Mine Sites | NGDIR News Section-- Simulation Engineering Technologies (SET) is a leader in creating accurate computer simulation models of complex systems. They have over 20 years of collective experience in conducting simulation studies in mining, logistics, manufacturing and service industries.
Using simulation technology has become mandatory for leading companies when performing due diligence studies of a new mine, process design or changing current design parameters.
Rock handling systems
SET ha.....[ More] | |
| | 1390/10/27 | | Saving Savuka: 3D Modelling to the Rescue | NGDIR News Section-- An underground earthquake and its aftershocks devastated the 4km shaft of AngloGold Ashanti's Savuka mine in 2009. Chris Lo investigates how the company used 3D modelling software in its $30 million effort to pick up the pieces.
South Africa is home to the deepest underground mines in the world. Delving nearly four kilometres below the earth's surface, the depth of AngloGold Ashanti's Savuka gold mine is second only to the company's neighbouring Mponeng mine.
Extracti.....[ More] | |
|  | 1390/10/25 | | New Map of the Universe Reveals its History for the Past Six-billion Years | NGDIR News Section-- The scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including astronomers at Penn State, have produced a new map of the universe that is in full color, covers more than one quarter of the entire sky, and is full of so much detail that you would need five-hundred-thousand high-definition TVs to view it all. The map consists of more than one-trillion pixels measured by meticulously scanning the sky with a special-purpose telescope located in New Mexico. This week, at the an.....[ More] | |
| | 1390/10/21 | | Flipped from Head to Toe: 100 Years of Continental Drift Theory | NGDIR News Section-- Exactly 100 years ago, on 6 January 1912, Alfred Wegener presented his theory of continental drift to the public for the first time. At a meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt's Senckenberg Museum, he revealed his thoughts on the supercontinent Pangaea, which broke apart and whose individual parts now drift across Earth as today's continents. In 1915, he published his book "The Origin of Continents and Oceans." Its third edition in 1922 was translated into the l.....[ More] | |
| | 1390/10/19 | | Climate Change is Altering Mountain Vegetation at Large Scale, European Research Says | NGDIR News Section-- The decade from 2000 to 2009 was the warmest since global climate has been measured, and while localized studies have shown evidence of changes in mountain plant communities that reflect this warming trend, no study has yet taken a continental-scale view of the situation - until now.
With the publication of "Continent-wide response of mountain vegetation to climate change," scheduled for Advance Online Publication (AOP) in Nature Climate Change on 8 January, researchers f.....[ More] | |
|  | 1390/10/19 | | Depleted Gas Reservoirs can Double as Geologic Carbon Storage Sites | NGDIR News Section-- A demonstration project on the southeastern tip of Australia has helped to verify that depleted natural gas reservoirs can be repurposed for geologic carbon sequestration, which is a climate change mitigation strategy that involves pumping CO2 deep underground for permanent storage.
The project, which includes scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), also demonstrated that depleted gas fields have enough CO2 storage capacity to make a signific.....[ More] | |
|  | 1390/10/14 | | Mercury in the Atmosphere | NGDIR News Section-- Mercury is an extremely toxic material. It is known to emitted to the atmosphere but what happens to the Mercury after that? How is it removed or processed? Humans pump thousands of tons of vapor from the metallic element mercury into the atmosphere each year, and it can remain suspended for long periods before being changed into a form that is easily removed from the atmosphere. New research shows that the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere work to transform elemental.....[ More] | |
|  | 1390/10/13 | | How to See the Best Meteor Showers of the Year | NGDIR News Section-- Whether you're watching from a downtown area or the dark countryside, here are some tips to help you enjoy these celestial shows of shooting stars. Those streaks of light are really caused by tiny specks of comet-stuff hitting Earth's atmosphere at very high speed and disintegrating in flashes of light.
First a word about the moon - it is not the meteor watcher's friend. Light reflecting off a bright moon can be just as detrimental to good meteor viewing as those bright l.....[ More] | |
|
| |
|
|
| |
Others Activities:
