news 2022

When tectonic plates collide and thrust over each other and cause an earthquake, a tsunami can occur. That should not happen in an earthquake where the plates slide past each other. And yet that was exactly what happened on 28 September 2018 near Palu Bay (Sulawesi, Indonesia), mere minutes after an earthquake of that second category.

The Earth's mantle makes up about 85% of the Earth's volume and is made of solid rock. But what rock types is the mantle exactly made of, and how are they distributed throughout the mantle? An international team of researchers - including UT researcher Dr Juan Carlos Afonso (Faculty of ITC) - have been able to reveal the existence of pockets of rocks with abnormal properties that suggest that they were once created at the surface, transported to vast depths along subduction zones, and accumulated at specific depths inside the Earth's mantle.

Increasing melt threatens to saturate the firn layer that covers the Greenland ice sheet. Saturation of this layer will dramatically increase global sea level rise, adding about 9 mm a year from the Greenland ice sheet alone (the current sea level rise from all sources is about 4 mm per year). A new study by researchers from Utrecht University, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, and University of Colorado Boulder now shows that this threshold could be reached as early as the first half of the 22 century.

Earth and climate scientists from Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam united forces to disentangle the combined effects of diminishing snow cover and a changing jet stream on recent Siberian fire extremes. The study was published today in the scientific journal Science. With a total of about 200,000 km2 of forest and tundra burned - equaling nearly five times the size of the Netherlands - the years 2019, 2020 and 2021 were the largest fire years in northern Siberian larch forests since 2001.

Longread Can minerals help extract the greenhouse gas CO2 from the air? PhD candidate Emily te Pas is investigating the potential of spreading crushed silicate minerals on agricultural land. 'This is still pioneering at this stage. It is important to collect data: does it work and is it safe?'' Photo above: Marcel van den Bergh At a testing site in Renkum, PhD candidate Emily te Pas is investigating whether the greenhouse gas CO2 can be extracted from the air by adding silicate minerals to agricultural soil.

At a slow pace, the Moon is moving away from the Earth and the Earth is rotating more slowly around its axis. To say something about these changes in the distant past, geologists use information stored in rocks and fossils. But the further back in time they look, the more difficult it becomes to retrieve this information.

An international team of scientists used molecular fossils and machine learning to build the first charts of Antarctic Ocean temperatures over the past 45 million years, offering important insights into the mechanisms driving temperature changes and into the future of the Antarctic ice sheet and sea level changes.

They hit the headlines almost daily in the summer: major wildfires that reduce thousands of hectares to ashes.

Until recently, scientists were dependent on information about past plate tectonics when reconstructing past global mean sea level. But now, a team of Dutch, British and American Earth scientists have developed a new method for determining historic global sea level where the influence of land ice is included.

Sea level rise along the Dutch coastline is accelerating. This is the conclusion of a new study carried out by researchers at TU Delft. A detailed analysis of the measurements at eight tidal stations along the Dutch coastline (including stations located at Maassluis, Delfzijl and Vlissingen) makes it clear that the average sea level rise - since the mid-1990s - has been 2.7 ± 0.4* millimetres per year.