Earth & Environmental Sciences Blogs

Fire Ecology Many ecosystems, which comprise plants and animals that interact with one another and with their physical surroundings, have fire as a natural component. The study of fire's influence in ecosystems is known as fire ecology. Fire ecologists research the origins of fire, the factors that determine its spread and intensity, the interaction between fire and ecosystems, and how controlled burns can be used to keep ecosystems healthy. Influence of Fire Fire has influenced natural selection and plant evolution over millions of years as part of the Earth's natural cycle. Plants have evolved numerous methods to cope with periodic fires over time, allowing them to live and reproduce in fire-prone settings. As a result, fire now plays an important role in the life cycles of many types of forests and other natural ecosystems (grasslands, deserts, prairies, and so on). While fire provides numerous ecological benefits, it may also pose a major threat to houses, communiti...

  Figure 1  Saidmarreh Landslide in Saidmarreh, Iran, as seen by Landsat. The top of the Kabir Kuh anticline borders the slide's source area on the southwest. The debris from the avalanche flowed down the anticline's flank, across the Karkheh River, and across the valley floor. Some of the slide's contents were transported 14 kilometers (9 miles). Luristan is a province of Iran in the southwest bordering Iraq. It is a mountainous region with peaks reaching up to 9000 feet, whose shape is shaped by simple, almost symmetrical folds in which the limestone bodies, which are strong and resistant, serve as feature-making rocks. The strata are arranged in the following order: Figure 2 Stratigraphic column of Zagros Mountains. A 15-kilometer-long slab of Tertiary limestone slid off the northern face of Kabir Kuh in The Zagros Mountains of southern Iran more than 10,000 years ago, causing the landslide that spanned two valleys and an intervening mountain, extending 20 kilometers fro...

The Oort Cloud is located far beyond Pluto and the Kuiper Belt's furthest reaches. The Oort cloud is thought to form a massive spherical shell enclosing the Sun, planets, and Kuiper Belt Objects, while the planets of our solar system circle in a flat plane. It resembles a large, thick bubble made of icy, comet-like particles that surround our solar system. The frozen bodies of the Oort cloud can be as big as mountains – and occasionally even bigger. Figure 1 Oort Cloud formation. The Oort cloud is our solar system's most remote part, extending around one-quarter to halfway between our Sun and the next star, and it's awe-inspiringly far away. To understand the distance to the Oort Cloud, put miles and kilometers aside and instead use the astronomical unit, or AU – a number defined as the distance between Earth and the Sun, with 1 AU equaling around 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. Pluto's highly elliptical orbit, by comparison, takes it between 30 and 50 astro...

Formation Mercury was created around 4.5 billion years ago when gravity drew whirling gas and dust together to form the tiny planet closest to the Sun. Mercury, like its other terrestrial planets, has a solid crust, a rocky mantle, and a central core. Internal Structure Mercury, after Earth, is the second most dense planet. The metal core of the planet has a huge metallic radius of around 2.074 km, almost 85% of the radius of the planet. It has been shown to be somewhat molten or fluid. The external shell of Mercury is only approximately 400 kilometers thick (250 miles) and is similar to Earth's external shell (named mantle and crust). Mercury's comparatively massive nickel-iron core and thin crustal mantle imply a catastrophic collision occurred during the planet's final phases of creation. Most of the planet's original mantle may have been blasted into space by a glancing hit from a massive planetesimal, leaving behind a planet with a comparatively big core. Surface F...

Introduction Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, is an ice planet with a golden hazy atmosphere that totally obscures its surface. Titan is our solar system's second-biggest moon. Only Jupiter's moon Ganymede is slightly bigger, by 2%. Titan is larger than the moon of Earth and even larger than the planet Mercury. This massive moon is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, as well as the only world in the solar system with standing bodies of liquid on its surface, such as rivers, lakes, and seas. Titan's atmosphere contains mostly nitrogen with a tiny quantity of methane, just like Earth's. It is the only other location in the solar system known to have an earthlike water cycle, with liquids falling from clouds, flowing over its surface, filling lakes and seas, and evaporating back into the sky (like Earth's water cycle does). Titan is likewise supposed to contain a water ocean under its surface. Size and Distance Titan is about half the size o...