Travel Through Time

Scientists using NASA satellite and rainfall data have linked the recent El Nino to the greatest rise in wildfire activity in Indonesia since the record-breaking 1997-98 El Nino.

As rainfall sharply decreased during the last quarter of 2006 across the dense tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Malaysia, the land became exceptionally dry. This allowed wildfires to quickly spread, releasing large amounts of soot and tiny dust particles called aerosols that brought unhealthy pollution levels to the area.

A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping — diminishing — deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.

It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth’s deep mantle.

Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, working with former graduate student Jesse Lawrence (now at the University of California, San Diego), analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms and found a large area in Earth’s lower mantle beneath eastern Asia where water is damping out, or attenuating, seismic waves from earthquakes.