When humans pump large volumes of fluid into the ground, they can set off potentially damaging earthquakes, depending on the underlying geology. This has been the case in certain oil- and gas-producing regions, where wastewater, often mixed with oil, is disposed of by injecting it back into the ground—a process that has triggered sizable seismic events in recent years. Now MIT researchers, working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists from industry and academia, have developed a meth

On February 7, 2017, the twentieth and final inclination (Delta-I) maneuver of Landsat 7 took place. (Delta-I maneuvers keep the spacecraft in the correct orbital position to ensure it maintains its 10:00 am ± 15 minutes mean local time (MLT) equatorial crossing.)  Landsat 7 reached its peak outermost inclination boundary of 10:14:58 MLT on August 11, 2017. Landsat 7 is now drifting in its inclination and will fall back to 09:15 am MLT by July 2021. The chart below illustrates the inclinati

Many of Africa’s agricultural endeavors have long been tied to whims of the weather. When it rains, a country’s gross domestic product might soar. When it doesn’t rain, economies suffer. The reliance has been driven in part by the perception that dry, arid Africa has limited water resources. But a new study, years in the making, shows a different reality. As one South African scientist recently noted, if all the rainfall stopped today and for the next 100 years in Africa, there would still

Classification of precipitation change regimes based on changes in the precipitation mean state and variability. Shading indicates the ratio of change in precipitation variability and mean precipitation. Climate models predict that rainfall variability over wet regions globally will be greatly enhanced by global warming, causing wide swings between dry and wet conditions, according to a joint study by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Science

Scientists from Cambridge University and NTU Singapore have found that slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates drag more carbon into Earth's interior than previously thought. They found that the carbon drawn into Earth's interior at subduction zones—where tectonic plates collide and dive into Earth's interior—tends to stay locked away at depth, rather than resurfacing in the form of volcanic emissions. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that only about a thir