During a successful first expedition to one of the most active earthquake fault zones on the planet, scientists unearthed initial clues to the geophysical fault properties that may underlie devastating earthquakes and tsunamis.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has resumed work on a water treatment
project in Basrah Province that had been suspended last year for security
reasons.
Lack of water causes great distress among the population in large parts of Africa and Asia. Small, decentralized water treatment plants with an autonomous power supply can help solve the problem: They transform salty seawater or brackish water into pure drinking water.
After some false starts, the first commercial attempt to create a geothermal power plant using hot dry rock technology reached a crucial milestone in late January, when a production well successfully reached its target depth of 13,850 feet. Hot dry rock technology, which draws energy from deep underground areas where geothermal heat is abundant, but no water exists to carry the heat to the surface, was employed to create the well.
A New Antarctic ice core should provide clearest climate record yet. The research team has recovered a 1,900-foot ice core – the first section of what is hoped to be a 11,360-foot column of ice detailing 100,000 years of Earth’s climate history, including a precise year-by-year record of the last 40,000 years.
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