Saturday, August 18th, 2007
It is growing under the sea off Trinidad - a mud volcano that fills people who live nearby with foreboding and may soon emerge as the world's newest island.
Since it was discovered in May by a pair of spearfishermen 5 miles off Trinidad's eastern shore, the mud volcano has attracted hordes of sightseers who trek to a bluff to watch waves crash over its summit, which measures 160 feet across.
Mud volcanoes are created when natural gases, often methane, escape pressurised areas from shallower levels in the crust. There is no larva or magma. The new mud volcano poses no threat to people on land.
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Thursday, August 16th, 2007
The rate and extent of coral loss are greater than expected, American researchers have found. And the reduction of coral rapidly causes a decline in the abundance and diversity of reef fish.
The estimated annual rate of coral cover loss in the Caribbean is over three times the estimated net annual loss of global humid tropical rainforest.
Additionally, the patterns of coral reef degradation are very different from rainforest loss in that nearly all reefs have been affected; there are virtually no remaining pristine reefs and very few with coral cover close to the historical average...
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Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
TOOTHED whales may owe their deep-dive ability to the power of echolocation.
Early whales preyed on nautiluses and squid, which rose to the surface waters only under cover of darkness. To take advantage of this midnight feast, the ancestors of today's sperm whales evolved to find their prey by echolocation. Once in place, this adaptation allowed whales to track molluscs into the inky depths during the day, say David Lindberg and Nicholas Pyenson of the University of California at Berkeley.
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Saturday, August 11th, 2007
Matt Friedman, a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the US, has stumbled across a unique fossil that reveals how the coelacanth evolved its fins - previously considered to be close relatives of the hands and feet of land animals.
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Friday, August 10th, 2007
Divers say a 3,000-year-old UK wreck site has been deliberately sabotaged. The site has revealed Bronze-Age artefacts including axe heads, rapier blades and a gold torc.
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Monday, August 6th, 2007
Rumours have it that a hoard of gold and diamonds were secreted by the Nazis in an unknown location. Some believe that location is on the sea bed off the coast of Corsica. Now a British expert has said he knows for sure that the treasure lies in waters less than a nautical mile off Bastia, the seaport in northern Corsica. This will be an official treasure hunt, with the support of the French maritime archaeological department in Marseilles.
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