News that the Arctic continues to warm, the 1962 Alcatraz escapees could have survived, and there’s methane on Mars was unveiled at the 2014 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting.
In addition, more than 140 journalists from around the world reported on the latest findings about the California drought, the Greenland ice sheet, and the Rosetta mission, among other new scientific discoveries. At last count, more than 4100 news stories were generated about science presented at the Fall Meeting, due in part to the 23 press conferences and workshops organized by AGU’s Public Information Office.
The AGU Blogosphere ran more than 40 posts related to the Fall Meeting, including more than 25 stories by students from the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. These guest bloggers, reporting for AGU’s blog GeoSpace, scoured the poster hall and scientific sessions for news about volcanoes, planets, the ocean, and other Earth and space science topics.
Some of the top headlines to come out of last year’s Fall Meeting include:
- A burst of methane detected by the Mars Curiosity rover might be a sign that there is life on the red planet.
- Air temperatures in the Arctic continue to rise, melting ice and affecting polar bear and fish populations.
- The 1962 Alcatraz escapees had a small chance of making it to land alive, according to a new computer model.
- A majority of U.S. coastal areas are likely to be threatened by 30 or more days of flooding each year due to dramatically accelerating impacts from sea level rise.
- The fault that caused last year’s earthquake in Napa, Calif., could move by an additional few inches over the next 3 years.
- Rosetta mission scientists said the Philae lander currently in hibernation on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko could wake up as soon as February 2015.
- Satellite images show that holiday lights increase the brightness of many major U.S. cities between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.
- California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from its epic drought, according to new satellite data.
- Radar and satellite measurements show changes in Greenland’s ice sheet that could speed up its melting.
- A pulse of water released down the Colorado River into Mexico appears to have helped restore vegetation in the river’s delta region.
Hundreds of media outlets carried news from the meeting, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, Agence France Presse, BBC News, CBS News, National Geographic, Science Magazine, Scientific American, The Christian Science Monitor, Climate Central, Mashable, and Wired.
—Nanci Bompey, Public Information Specialist and Writer, AGU; email: nbompey@agu.org
Citation: Bompey, N. (2015), Fall Meeting science makes headlines, Eos, 96, doi:10.1029/2015EO023559. Published on 9 February 2015.
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