A new paper in Earth’s Future examines the inputs and outputs, costs and benefits of three categories of ocean farming: human fed (fish, crustaceans), sunlight fed (seaweed) and “unfed” (shellfish).
Credit: Liu et al. (2024) Earth’s Future https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003766
AGU News
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Registration is open for the Water Science Conference, a collaboration of AGU and the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) convening 24-27 June in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The program features the confluence of science, policy and community and sessions coupling research to applied workshops. Interested reporters and press officers should email [email protected] with credentials. [press information][scientific program][eligibility]
Featured Research
Streams lose year-round flow in California
A survey of stream gauges in dry regions of California found 13% of 158 minimally-disturbed streams had lost perennial flow — a sign of the drying influence of a warming climate. Streams burdened by human development are generally drying faster but, in some cases, regulation has made water flow perennially in previously ephemeral streams. [Water Resources Research]
Landslides mark “recent” tectonic activity on Mars
In western Arabia Terra, Mars, a long fault system shows signs of repeated activity during the last 2 billion years, a time when the Red Planet was thought to have little tectonic activity. Four landslides of different ages tumble to the crater floor, triggered by tectonic processes that shorten the crust, thrusting up a chunk of the surface and creating a scarp up to 700 meters high. The total displacement would require about 3,300 marsquakes of the magnitude observed in the modern era, the researchers calculated. [Geophysical Research Letters research]
Farming the seas wisely has ecological benefits
Mariculture employing seaweed rafts, deep fish cages and shellfish rafts, hanging cages, and bottom sowing could turn ecological burdens into benefits with strategic selection of species, technology and location. Case studies off the coast of China, the largest mariculture producer, demonstrate combining approaches can mitigate water contamination from intensive fish farming – and feed a lot of people. [Earth’s Future research][special issue on Environmental Constraints to Increasing Complexity in the Biosphere]
Auroras signal more oxygen on Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede
in 2021, the Juno spacecraft passed within 1,053 kilometers of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, getting a close look at the flow of plasma and charged particles between the massive magnetosphere of the planet and the moon. All of that electron inflow from Jupiter excites a UV aurora in the thin atmosphere of the moon, suggesting it holds 10 times more oxygen than previously calculated, and that a unique oxygen-generation process may be in effect on the solar system’s icy moons. [JGR Planets research]
Alerting communities to hyperlocalized urban flooding
A high-accuracy, low-cost sensor network may change the way urban floods are detected and monitored. [Eos research spotlight][Water Resources Research]
The secret to mimicking natural faults? Plexiglass and Teflon
Researchers found an effective way to produce natural fault behavior in the laboratory. [Eos research spotlight] [Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth research]
Tiny satellites can provide significant information about space
Students and faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder use CubeSats to learn more about the near-Earth environment. [Eos research spotlight][AGU Advances research]
A new scheme to empower global air-conditioning energy modeling
An explicit air-conditioning adoption scheme and a global dataset improve urban energy demand modeling and unlock exciting capabilities in Earth system models. [Eos editors’ highlight][Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems research]
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