It is the mightiest of the world's great rivers: the Amazon. Draining an area equivalent to more than two thirds of the continental United States, it pours into the Atlantic Ocean about one-fifth of the freshwater that flows into all the world's oceans, a volume so prodigious that it alters ocean salt levels 200 miles from its mouth. And yet, contends Dr. Jeffrey Richey, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Washington, most of us misperceive the physical nature of a mighty river like the Amazon. "Usually, big rivers are thought of as just pipes from the land to the ocean," he says. "Nobody thinks much about what goes on inside of one."

NSF-Supported Teams Provide New Data on Early Moments of the Universe
Antarctic-based instruments support each other's results

Two teams of cosmologists released new findings on April 29 about the nature of the universe in its infancy. Their spectacular images of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), taken with instruments operating from Antarctica, reveal the strongest evidence to date for the theory of inflation, the leading model for the formation of the universe. The announcement represents the first release of data from the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), a 13-element ground-based instrument operating since last year at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Amundsen Scott South Pole Station. Scientists also released similar results from further analysis of data from the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERANG) project, obtained in 1998 and first reported last year.

Genetics reached a major milestone late last year as an international research team announced it had completed the first plant genome sequence. The species Arabidopsis thaliana has emerged as the plant counterpart of the laboratory mouse, offering clues to how all sorts of living organisms behave genetically, with potentially widespread applications for agriculture, medicine and energy.

Find Out Why: Underwater Eruptions

Some of the biggest volcanoes on Earth have never been seen by any human. That’s because they’re more than a mile underwater. You’d have to dive down a mile and a half just to reach the tops of these volcanoes. This string of underwater volcanoes is called the Mid-Ocean Ridge. The Mid-Ocean Ridge is the biggest mountain range on our planet.

It’s more than 30,000 miles long and almost 500 miles wide. Its hundreds of mountains and volcanoes zigzag under the ocean between the continents, winding their way around the globe like the seam on a baseball. That means there are underwater mountains and volcanoes all around the world.

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Volcano Research Erupts with International Initiatives

In a U.S.-Russia Cooperative Research award sponsored by the NSF’s Central & Eastern Europe program and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), about 150 leading geoscientists from the U.S., Russia and Japan have been convening to discuss advanced research on volcanoes and earthquakes in the Kamchatkan-Aleutian Arc. The several thousand mile long tectonic boundary plate - one of the most active sites of earthquake and volcanic eruptions on Earth - crosses international borders from the volcanic Aleutian Arc of southern Alaska to the Kamchatka/Kuril Arcs of Russia and Northern Japan.

One of the U.S coordinators for the U.S.-Russia Cooperative Research is Prof. John Eichelberger of the University of Alaska. He is also the Coordinating Scientist for the US Geological Survey's Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO), which seismically monitors about 20 Aleutian Arc Volcanoes, releases regular updates describing the current state of volcanic activity via the Internet and also posts Kamchatkan updates from colleagues at the Kamchatkan Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT).