Feature Channels: Geology

• share
• favorite_border

ASU scientists develop technique to trace volcano heat pulses; may help better predict risk

• share
• favorite_border

The classic red teardrop of magma underneath a volcano peak is too simplistic. Magma chambers are chemically and physically complex structures that new evidence, published this week in Science, suggests may be cooler and more solid than expected.

• share
• favorite_border

Hundreds of built and proposed hydroelectric dams may significantly harm life in and around the Amazon by trapping the flow of rich nutrients and modifying the climate from Central America to the Gulf of Mexico. These findings, published in Nature, emerge from a multidisciplinary, international collaboration of researchers from 10 universities, led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin.

• share
• favorite_border

A North Dakota State University assistant professor has received a national award that will bring more than $500,000 to the geosciences department at NDSU and provide research opportunities for students.

• share
• favorite_border

Dr. David Borrok, a professor of geosciences and director of the School of Geosciences at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has been named chair of geosciences and geological and petroleum engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

A long-lasting lake on ancient Mars provided stable environmental conditions that differed significantly from one part of the lake to another, according to a comprehensive look at findings from the first three-and-a-half years of NASA’s Curiosity rover mission.

• share
• favorite_border

Lighter-toned bedrock that surrounds fractures and comprises high concentrations of silica—called “halos”—has been found in Gale crater on Mars, indicating that the planet had liquid water much longer than previously believed.

• share
• favorite_border

The discovery of anomalously high levels of mercury in rocks from the Ordivician geological period has led to a new interpretation of the ensuing mass extinction. A sequence of disturbances may have led to catastrophic cooling by reflective sulfate aerosols injected into the atmosphere by massive volcanism. The finding is important since aerosol cooling is under consideration as a way to temper global warming.

• share
• favorite_border

An international team of scientists has found evidence suggesting the dehydration of minerals deep below the ocean floor influenced the severity of the Sumatra earthquake, which took place on December 26, 2004.

• share
• favorite_border

Experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source have helped scientists to solve a mystery of why some rocks can float for years in the ocean, traveling thousands of miles before sinking.

• share
• favorite_border

UNLV research in Russia challenges widely held understanding of past climate history; study appears in latest issue of top journal Nature Geoscience.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers led by the Virginia Tech College of Science discovered that deep portions of Earth’s mantle might be as hot as it was more than 2.5 billion years ago.

• share
• favorite_border

Decades of Sandia National Laboratories expertise on how salt domes behave went into a recent report that concluded that the U.S. Department of Energy is justified in extending the life of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

• share
• favorite_border

Geologists at Cornell College are trying to discover how El Niño will behave in the future, and they are doing so by looking back in time.

• share
• favorite_border

A basin in the Falkland Islands exhibits traits of a large impact crater, according to a new analysis by a team of scientists.

• share
• favorite_border

Using radioactive elements trapped in crystallized, cream-colored “veins” in New Mexican rock, geologists have peered back in time more than 400,000 years to illuminate a record of earthquakes along the Loma Blanca fault in the Rio Grande rift. It is the longest record of earthquakes ever documented on a fault.

• share
• favorite_border

Recent articles have declared that deposits of mineral raw materials (copper, zinc, etc.) will be exhausted within a few decades. An international team, including the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, has shown that this is incorrect and that the resources of most mineral commodities are sufficient to meet the growing demand from industrialization and future demographic changes. Future shortages will arise not from physical exhaustion of different metals but from causes related to industrial exploitation, the economy, and environmental or societal pressures on the use of mineral resources. The report can be read in the journal Geochemical Perspectives.

• share
• favorite_border

Special ‘nugget-producing’ bacteria may hold the key to more efficient processing of gold ore, mine tailings and recycled electronics, as well as aid in exploration for new deposits, University of Adelaide research has shown.

• share
• favorite_border

Explorers planning to settle on Mars might be able to turn the planet’s red soil into bricks without needing to use an oven or additional ingredients. Instead, they would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer. These are the findings of a study published in Nature Scientific Reports on April 27, 2017. The study was authored by a team of engineers at the University of California San Diego and funded by NASA.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

University of Iowa volcanologist Ingrid Ukstins spent two weeks collecting samples from Yasur, a continuously erupting volcano on Tanna, an island in the remote South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, to study its chemical composition and determine how the gasses it produces may be affecting people who live nearby.

• share
• favorite_border

Agronomy is the study of crop and soil science – important in delivering food from farm to table. But most people don’t know the word. And most agronomists – the scientists working in the field of agronomy – find their complicated jobs hard to explain. That means there is a communication gap, and Nels Hansen wants to help solve it.

• share
• favorite_border

We are creating robotic systems that are small, mobile, connected, and enduring, making them a perfect match for the remote Arctic to give the USCG the ability to understand an incident while there is still time to react.

• share
• favorite_border

A new facility at the University of Arkansas combines laser ablation and mass spectrometry for quick, efficient analysis of trace elements and radiogenic isotopes.

• share
• favorite_border

An unusual fossil find is giving scientists new ideas about how some of the earliest animals on Earth came to dominate the world’s oceans.

• share
• favorite_border

The world’s most valuable copper deposits, known as porphyry deposits, originate from cooling magma. But how can we predict the size of these deposits? What factors govern the amount of copper present?

• share
• favorite_border

A study that used a new digital library and machine reading system to suck the factual marrow from millions of geologic publications dating back decades has unraveled a longstanding mystery of ancient life: Why did easy-to-see and once-common structures called stromatolites essentially cease forming over the long arc of earth history?

• share
• favorite_border

A new program involving Arizona State University aims to improve minority representation in the field of geological sciences.

• share
• favorite_border

Using advanced modeling and simulation, seismic data generated by earthquakes, and one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a team led by Jeroen Tromp of Princeton University is creating a detailed 3-D picture of Earth’s interior. Currently, the team is focused on imaging the entire globe from the surface to the core–mantle boundary, a depth of 1,800 miles.

• share
• favorite_border

An algorithm for stock prices can be used with GPS data to automatically detect slow-slip earthquakes at a single station, offering a new way to monitor seismic activity.

• share
• favorite_border

When geologists went in search for evidence of ancient tsunamis along Southern California’s coastal wetlands, they found something else. Their discoveries have implications for seismic hazard and risk assessment in coastal Southern California.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

New research challenges the prevailing theory that the unique nature of Earth’s iron was the result of how its core was formed billions of years ago.

• share
• favorite_border

An international team of researchers found that fossil-like objects grew in natural spring water abundant in the early stages of the planet. But, they were inorganic materials that resulted from simple chemical reactions.

• share
• favorite_border

A number of volcanoes around the world continuously exhale gases. Of these, sulfur dioxide is the easiest to detect from space and now researchers have created the first global map of SO2 plumes from volcanoes.

• share
• favorite_border

Iowa State researchers have developed a new web application that makes it quick and easy for people to use 3-D printers to make terrain models of any place on Earth. Their idea -- they call it TouchTerrain -- could be a powerful teaching tool in geology classrooms.

• share
• favorite_border

UND Geology Faculty and Students Get Another First-Hand Glimpse of Largest Space Rock Ever Found in State

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

The Earth has known several mass extinctions over the course of its history. One of the most important happened at the Permian-Triassic boundary 250 million years ago. But researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working alongside the University of Zurich, discovered that this extinction took place during a short ice age which preceded the global climate warming.

• share
• favorite_border

The Newport-Inglewood and Rose Canyon faults had been considered separate systems but a new study shows that they are actually one continuous fault system running from San Diego Bay to Seal Beach in Orange County, then on land through the Los Angeles basin.

• share
• favorite_border

Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun. The finding, published Feb. 23, 2017 in the journal Nature, is important because it provides the first hard proof for what scientists call the “chaotic solar system.”

• share
• favorite_border

New work shows that interactions between iron and nickel under the extreme pressures and temperatures similar to a planetary interior can help scientists understand the period in our Solar System's youth when planets were forming and their cores were created.

• share
• favorite_border

Rising temperatures could accelerate climate change by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide stored in ponds and increasing the methane they release, new research shows.

• share
• favorite_border

Nicholas Warner, assistant professor of geology, was among planetary geologists recently presenting evidence to NASA scientists on the best Mars landing sites for the next rover mission, scheduled to launch in 2020.

• share
• favorite_border

In bitter cold regions like northwestern Canada, permafrost has preserved relict ground-ice and vast glacial sedimentary stores in a quasi-stable state. These landscapes therefore retain a high potential for climate-driven transformation.

• share
• favorite_border

Bias introduced through analyzing the magnetism of old rocks may not be giving geophysicists an accurate idea of how Earth's magnetic dynamo has functioned. A team led by Michigan Technological University shows there is a way to improve the methodology to get a better understanding of the planet's geodynamo.

• share
• favorite_border

James Cook University scientists have helped discover the remnants of a massive undersea landslide on the Great Barrier Reef.

• share
• favorite_border

Three new minerals discovered by a Michigan Tech alumnus are secondary crusts found in old uranium mines in southern Utah. They're bright, yellow and hard to find. Meet leesite, leószilárdite and redcanyonite.

• share
• favorite_border

The amount of carbon in the Earth's mantle has been the subject of hot debate for decades.