Tag: Earth science

  • Science & Tech

    Battling climate change on all fronts

    Harvard’s research spans the gamut from the sciences to the humanities, examining key questions about this critical challenge facing humanity.

    7–11 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Harvard Forest:

    Harvard may be rooted in Cambridge, but it has a lot more roots in the small north-central Massachusetts town of Petersham. That’s where you’ll find the woods, streams, and fields of the Harvard Forest, a 3,500-acre research and teaching facility that’s been part of the University for more than a century. Having been closely monitored…

    4–6 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Researchers observe ozone killer

    Harvard researchers have implicated a particular molecule in the destruction of Earth’s ozone layer. The molecule, made up of two chlorine atoms and two oxygen atoms, is called a chlorine monoxide dimer or chlorine peroxide, Cl-O-O-Cl. It has a crucial role in the process by which chlorine destroys atmospheric ozone. Though a variety of chemicals…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Did life originally spring from clay?

    While the research is a far cry from proving that humans sprang from clay, as some creation myths assert, it does provide a possible mechanism for explaining how life initially arose from nonliving molecules. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital showed that the presence of clay aids naturally occurring reactions…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Earth’s birth date turned back

    Radioactive elements in rocks decay in a predictable way, like the ticking of a well-made clock that can run for millions of years. The decay marks a change in character of the elements; one type of uranium, for example, decays into lead. To measure the age of meteorites, and thereby deteremine the age of Earth…

    1–2 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Earth’s new center

    The outer core is liquid, the inner core is solid. That’s the way Earth has been depicted in textbooks for the past 66 years. But the work of Adam Dziewonski, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, and graduate student Miaki Ishii shows that this picture doesn’t get to the bottom of things. Engulfed in…

    1–2 minutes