The location and amounts of iron in the rock gave important clues about ancient ocean
water chemistries over time.
Not exact matches
The study is the first to use long - term continuous
water chemistry data to document hydrological changes
over an enormous geographic area and a long time span.
So Fu and her colleagues observed
water vapor
over the Amazon with NASA's Aura satellite, a spacecraft dedicated to studying the
chemistry of Earth's atmosphere.
The answer is, our planet's atmosphere and oceans are not that well described by the basic
chemistry of a gas
over a beaker of
water.
«What our study shows is that observed
water vapor concentrations are high enough and temperatures are low enough
over the U.S. in summertime to initiate the
chemistry that is known to lead to ozone losses,» said Harvard atmospheric scientist David Wilmouth, one of the paper's co-authors, in an email.
By counting the number of scales left behind at various levels of the sediment cores, the researchers determined how much sunlight reached the bottom of the pond in a given year, allowing them to estimate the pond's
water depth, clarity and
chemistry over time.