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A new study demonstrated a new method, involving deep earthquakes, to measure the fluidity of the Earth's mantle. The study, by a scientist from University of Chicago, US, suggested there may be a layer of surprisingly fluid rock ringing the Earth, at the very bottom of the upper mantle. The finding was made by measuring the lingering movement registered by GPS sensors on islands in the wake of a deep earthquake in the Pacific Ocean near Fiji, the study published in the journal Nature said. "Even though the mantle makes up the largest part of Earth, there's still a lot we don't know about it," said Sunyoung Park, a geophysicist with the University of Chicago and the lead author on the study. "We think there's a lot more we can learn by using these deep earthquakes as a way to probe these questions," said Park. We still know surprisingly little about the Earth beneath our feet. The furthest anyone has managed to dig down is about seven and a half miles before the increasing heat .
NASA and IBM have collaborated to develop artificial intelligence (AI) based models that will make it easier to mine vast datasets to advance scientific knowledge about Earth, and help the world to adapt to a changing environment. The joint work will apply AI foundation model technology to NASA's Earth-observing satellite data for the first time, NASA said in a statement. Foundation models are types of AI models that are trained on a broad set of unlabelled data, can be used for different tasks, and can apply information about one situation to another. "The beauty of foundation models is they can potentially be used for many downstream applications," said Rahul Ramachandran, a senior research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Building these foundation models cannot be tackled by small teams; you need teams across different organisations to bring their different perspectives, resources, and skill sets," Ramachandran said in a statement. One project will train an IB
The world will cross the global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius within 10 to 15 years, even if emissions decline, according to a study that employed artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the results. If emissions remain high over the next few decades, the study predicts a one-in-two chance that Earth will become 2 degrees Celsius hotter on average compared to pre-industrial times by the middle of this century, and a more than four-in-five chance of reaching that threshold by 2060. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, employed AI to predict climate change using recent temperature observations from around the world. "Using an entirely new approach that relies on the current state of the climate system to make predictions about the future, we confirm that the world is on the cusp of crossing the 1.5 C threshold," said the study's lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University in the US. "Our AI mo
Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light-years away. Scientists reported Friday that this black hole is 10 times more massive than our sun. And it's three times closer than the previous record-holder. It was identified by observing the motion of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at about the same distance as Earth orbits the sun. The black hole was initially identified using the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, said Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. El-Badry and his team followed up with the International Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to confirm their findings, which were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers are uncertain how the system formed in the Milky Way. Named Gaia BH1, it's located in the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer.