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The Hindu
6 days ago
- Science
- The Hindu
Recognition for Cusat PhD scholar
Devika M. V., PhD scholar at the Advanced Centre for Atmospheric Radar Research (ACARR) in Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat), has won the outstanding student and PhD candidate presentation award at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2025 held in Vienna, Austria. Her award-winning poster titled 'Upper Tropospheric Humidity and Cloud Radiative Forcing: A Tropical Perspective' was prepared under the guidance of her PhD supervisor Ajil Kottayil, Scientist D, at the ACARR, and Viju. O. John, Climate Product Expert, EUMETSAT, Germany, according to a release issued by the varsity.
Edinburgh Reporter
17-05-2025
- General
- Edinburgh Reporter
The General Assembly opens in Edinburgh
The General Assembly 2025 opened in Edinburgh at the Assembly Hall on The Mound on Saturday and will continue until Thursday. The Rt Hon Lady Elish Angiolini LT, DBE, PC, KC, FRSE, represented His Majesty King Charges at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on Saturday. Lady Angiolini said that people are the creation of God and all require 'love, forgiveness and support' in all their imperfection. She said she was profoundly honoured to be chosen as the first practising Roman Catholic to be Lord High Commissioner at the annual gathering which began in Edinburgh today. Lady Elish's appointment was only made possible after both Houses of Parliament in London changed a law dating back to 1689 that barred Roman Catholics from holding the role. Addressing the General Assembly, she said: 'I am so pleased to be here with you all and particularly pleased I actually made it here. 'I would like to express my sincere thanks to everyone who helped secure my presence here today.' Her Grace said she believed that prejudice and sectarianism can be overcome by the recognition that we are 'all Jock Tamson's bairns'. Lady Elish said she was 11 when she remembered how that 'essential love of humanity' manifested in January 1971 when there was a crush among the crowd at an Old Firm football game at Ibrox, which caused 66 deaths and more than 200 injuries. Her father and neighbours went to the aid of people caught up in the tragedy. Lady Elish said: 'I, in turn, was on the receiving end of such compassion when I was a victim in the front carriage of the train when the Polmont rail disaster occurred in 1984 'Again, it was the kindness of complete strangers, other passengers, that I recollect to this day, as I lay trapped in the wreckage, comforted by their love and compassion as they teased me about how hopeless Celtic was to distract me from the horror of the situation we were in.' Read all of the reports and documents for the General Assembly 2025 here. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2025: Day One. Moderator Rt Reverend Rosie Frew is installed as Moderator in a ceremony at New College, Edinburgh. Her Grace Lady Elish Angiolini is Lord High Commissioner representing the King during the Assembly week. Pictured with at left First Minister for Scotland, John Swinney. Her Grace Lady Elish Angiolini is Lord High Commissioner representing the King during the Assembly week. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2025: Day One. First Minister John Swinney and the Rt Hon Lord Provost Robert Aldridge left watch on as Her Grace Lady Elish Angiolini is Lord High Commissioner representing the King during the Assembly week. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2025: Day One. Moderator Rt Reverend Rosie Frew is installed as Moderator in a ceremony at New College, Edinburgh. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2025: Day One. Moderator Rt Reverend Rosie Frew is installed as Moderator in a ceremony at New College, Edinburgh. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2025: Day One. Moderator Rt Reverend Rosie Frew is installed as Moderator in a ceremony at New College, Edinburgh. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2025: Day one. Pictured left Her Grace Lady Elish Angiolini. Like this: Like Related
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Earth Impactors Remain A Catastrophic Threat, Says Leading Geologist
Illustration of Pteranodon sp. flying reptiles watching a massive asteroid approaching Earth's ... More surface. A similar impact is believed to have led to the death of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The impact would have thrown trillions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, cooling the Earth's climate significantly, which may have been responsible for the mass extinction. A layer of iridium-rich rock, known as the K-pg boundary, is thought to be the remnants of the impact debris. Earth impactors of the sort that brought down the dinosaurs are now usually looked upon as relics of the distant past. Indeed, most of Earth's asteroidal incursions took place hundreds of millions of years earlier than the Chicxulub impactor that hit Earth some 66 million years ago. But each year astronomers detect new asteroids, and their impact threat remains real. The United Nations has even declared 2029 for as the 'International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defense.' Even if a small 50-meter diameter object hits a large city, it could easily kill a million people, Christian Koeberl, a planetary scientist at the University of Vienna, tells me at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2025 in Austria. We now know of 40,000 Earth crossing or near-Earth asteroids, he says. In a decade's time, we may have detected as many as 100,000 near-Earth asteroids, says Koeberl. Yet on Earth there are only 200 currently known impact craters and only three are known to be truly ancient between 2.2 to 2.3 billion years old. And less than half of the 200 have precisely determined ages. That's not very many, but Earth is an active geological body, and so things change on the surface over time, says Koeberl. On Earth, there's constant weathering, erosion, volcanism as well as plate tectonics, the means by which our planet recycles its crust. Even though Galileo first identified what we now know are impact craters on the moon in 1610, geologists didn't definitively link those lunar craters to impacts until rock samples from Apollo 11 were analyzed in Earth laboratories, says Koeberl. But in the 1980s, when evidence for the dinosaur-killing impactor was discovered, geologists realized that all you need is a very small asteroidal object to make a crater that is least 20 times larger than the impacting body, says Koeberl. How important has satellite remote sensing been in identifying Earth impact craters? It used to be somewhat useful, but it has run its course, because by now, we have identified all the circular structures that are obvious of impact origin, says Koeberl. Even so, Koeberl notes that he's constantly bombarded by amateur Google Earth impact sleuths who think they have found a new impact crater. But as Koeberl explains nearly all such photos have been formed by wholly Earth-based geological processes. Impacts are the highest energetic geological process that we know, says Koeberl. Each event per area, per affected rock is somewhere between a hundred to a few thousand times more energetic than the largest volcanic eruption possible, he says. In fact, they are so energetic that they cause changes in the affected rocks' mineral structure. I could name a dozen other geological processes that form circular crater-like features on Earth's surface, says Koeberl. This is what brings us to the very important point of shock metamorphism, which is how you identify an impact crater, he says. Koeberl takes out his laptop and shows me a magnified image of a quartz crystal rock that has the telltale signatures of impact shock. No normal quartz crystal will look like this, says Koeberl. The lines that go through here are what we call shock lamellae, and they only form from an impact and no other geological process, he says. The paucity of ancient craters also correlates with major episodes of extensive 'Snowball Earth' glaciation phases, with its related subglacial erosion some 650 to 720 million years ago, Koeberl and colleagues note in a 2024 paper in the journal Precambrian Research. It's thought to have removed kilometers of material from the continents, enough to erase most existing impact craters except for the large ones, they write. Despite their potential for calamity, serendipitously, a few impacts have inadvertently revealed precious metals buried beneath Earth's surface. Located in the center of the Witwatersrand gold fields in present day South Africa, the Vredefort impact event formed the largest impact structure that remains at least partly preserved, the authors note. Some two billion years ago, the impact uplifted a massive gold cache that since the 1880s has generated about a third of the total gold ever extracted from our planet, they write. Trouble is, most of us fail to realize that we live in a dynamic solar system with asteroidal and cometary leftovers from its formation that potentially threaten life here in untold ways. Past impact craters on the surface of our planet serve as a reminder that we are constantly bombarded from space, often with devastating consequences, says Koeberl. Such events happened in the past and will happen in the future, he says.
India Today
05-05-2025
- Science
- India Today
How dust from Africa's Sahara Desert is wreaking havoc in Europe
As Europe accelerates its shift to solar energy to meet ambitious climate and energy security goals, a formidable new challenge is emerging from the skies: Saharan to research presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2025 (EGU25), mineral dust carried by winds from North Africa is not only reducing photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation across the continent but also making solar power output harder to Gyorgy Varga and a team of researchers from Hungarian and European institutions analyzed more than 46 Saharan dust events between 2019 and 2023, covering both Central Europe (Hungary) and Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece). Saharan dust also poses long-term risks to solar infrastructure. (Photo: Nasa) Their findings reveal that the Sahara releases billions of tonnes of fine dust into the atmosphere annually, with tens of millions of tonnes reaching aloft, these particles scatter and absorb sunlight, diminish surface irradiance, and even encourage cloud formation-all of which degrade the performance of solar study highlights a critical gap in current solar energy forecasting. Conventional models rely on static aerosol data, which often fails to capture the real-time impact of dust a result, solar power generation can fall short of expectations, increasing the risk of underperformance and grid instability as renewables take on a larger share of the energy mix. Sahara releases billions of tonnes of fine dust into the atmosphere annually. (Photo: Getty) The researchers recommend integrating near-real-time dust load measurements and aerosol-cloud interactions into forecasting models to improve reliability and preparedness for dust-related variability.'There's a growing need for dynamic forecasting methods that account for both meteorological and mineralogical factors,' says Dr. Varga. 'Without them, the risk of underperformance and grid instability will only grow as solar becomes a larger part of our energy mix'.Beyond the atmospheric effects, Saharan dust also poses long-term risks to solar infrastructure. Dust contamination and erosion can further reduce panel efficiency and drive up maintenance costs, threatening the economic viability of large-scale solar Reel
