news 2017

Heat from the friction of rocks caused by tidal forces could be the "engine" for the hydrothermal activity on Saturn's moon Enceladus. This presupposes that the moon has a porous core that allows water from the overlying ocean to seep in, where the tidal friction exerted on the rocks heats it. This shows a computer simulation based on observations from the European-American Cassini-Huygens mission.

Research news Scientists in Munich have completed the first detailed simulation of the Sumatra earthquake that triggered a devastating tsunami on Christmas 2004. The results of the largest-ever rupture dynamics simulation of an earthquake offer new insights into the underlying geophysical processes. It was performed on the SuperMUC supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich.

A prehistoric human skeleton found on the Yucatán Peninsula is at least 13,000 years old and most likely dates from a glacial period at the end of the most recent ice age, the late Pleistocene. A German-Mexican team of researchers led by Wolfgang Stinnesbeck and Arturo González González has now dated the fossil skeleton based on a stalagmite that grew on the hip bone.

According to the latest research results of a German-Mexican team of geoscientists, the gradual decline of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs presumably came before the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid and the global mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Studies under the direction of Wolfgang Stinnesbeck of Heidelberg University and Eberhard Frey of the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe also indicate that bird species spread and diversified at the same time the dinosaurs disappeared.