Sediments pulled up from a drilling project in the Dead Sea suggest that the salty lake completely disappeared about 120,000 years ago, a finding that violates assumptions long held by scientists. The results, reported at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on 5 December, raise questions about how the warming climate will affect the endangered sea, where water levels have been dropping rapidly in the past few decades.

The US $2.6 million international Dead Sea Deep Drilling Project bored a series of holes into the lake from November 2010 to March 2011 to study the climate and earthquake history in the region. Last month, the team finished opening up the sediment cores and discovered a layer of rounded pebbles 230 meters below the surface of the seafloor. The pebble layer represents an ancient beach that filled the lowest level of the basin as the lake was drying up completely or nearly so, the researchers propose. “There’s nothing else like it in the core,” says Steven Goldstein, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York and a leader of the project. The Dead Sea work was funded by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program and by Israel, Germany, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the United States.

Experiments in the past using water from the Dead Sea had suggested that the lake could not disappear totally because the loss of water would concentrate salt within the lake, inhibiting further evaporation. But the new findings call that assumption into question. Climate forecasts suggest that the region will grow warmer and drier in the future, says Emi Ito, a lake researcher at the University of Minnesota and a principal investigator on the drilling project.

The lake level has been dropping precipitously recently because Israel and Jordan divert water that previously flowed into the Dead Sea. In the past 14 years, the lake surface has lowered by 14 metres and now stands at 425 metres below sea level. Israel and Jordan are considering a controversial proposal to refill the lake by constructing a canal from the Red Sea into the Dead Sea.

photo: Dead Sea Drilling Barge (credit: OSG–GFZ, ICDP)

The editor of the journal Remote Sensing resigned today, saying in an editorial that his journal never should have published a controversial paper in July that challenged the reliability of climate models used to forecast global warming. The paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, proposed that climate researchers have likely made a fundamental error by overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse-gas pollution.

The climate-research blog Real Climate and other mainstream researchers complained that the paper was itself fundamentally flawed, but the Remote Sensing article garnered support from climate skeptics and significant press attention, thanks in part to an overly hyped press release. The editor of Remote Sensing, Wolfgang Wagner of the Vienna University of Technology, said he now views the paper as “fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal. This regrettably brought me to the decision to resign as Editor-in-Chief—to make clear that the journal Remote Sensing takes the review process seriously.”

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Vibrations from a major earthquake in rural Virginia rattled residents across much of the Eastern United States today, prompting evacuations of many buildings in Washington DC, New York and Boston. Ivan Semeniuk, from Nature’s Washington DC bureau, snapped this image of evacuees on Pennsylvania Avenue, within sight of the Capitol building.

The US Geological Survey pegged the quake size at a magnitude 5.9, which would make this shock one of the biggest in Virginia’s recorded history. A quake of about the same size occurred in the state in 1897. Today’s quake struck at 1:51 (EDT) and reverberated up the east coast, momentarily interrupting a busy working day in some of the most densely populated cities in North America.

Major earthquakes in the eastern United States are rare because the crust is old and mostly stable. But when quakes do occur, the strong crustal rock transmits the seismic waves with relatively little loss of energy, so they can race across vast distances. Initial reports suggested the vibrations were felt at least as far as New Hampshire, some 500 miles away.

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<img alt=“Bedrockb260.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/Bedrockb260.jpg” width=“260” height=“198” align=right />

New results from a drilling project in Greenland suggest that the ice sheet there may be more stable—and Antarctica’s may be less stable—than previously thought. The findings, which come from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, were presented on Thursday at a symposium on Antarctic science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Researchers concerned about the potential for catastrophic sea level rise have long worried that global warming might melt parts of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet. Substantial loss from either could raise sea levels by several meters, inundating parts of New York, London, and many other of the world’s major cities.

One way to assess the stability of the ice sheets is to look at how they fared during the Eemian period, the warm spell from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago that came just before the last ice age. During the Eemian, temperatures in Greenland were as much as 5 degrees C higher than recent values, a temperature hike on par with what that area might experience by 2100 if greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise. So researchers have been chasing Eemian ice for decades by drilling holes through the thick Greenland ice cap. But those earlier efforts have all come up empty. The Eemian ice had either been melted or mangled by the slow movement of the ice sheets.

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