Feature Channels: Geology

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The 7.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal about 50 miles northwest of Kathmandu April 25 has caused thousands of deaths, injuries and massive damage. Geological experts from Florida State University are available to comment on the earthquake and the deadly avalanches that followed.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: exercise and obesity, Focused Ultrasound to treat uterine fibroids, neurology, diet supplements and cancer (day 4 in top 10), genetics, geology, skin cancer, sleep and Alzheimer's, and water conservation.

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University of Utah seismologists discovered and made images of a reservoir of hot, partly molten rock 12 to 28 miles beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano, and it is 4.4 times larger than the shallower, long-known magma chamber. The hot rock in the newly discovered, deeper magma reservoir would fill the 1,000-cubic-mile Grand Canyon 11.2 times.

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Soil scientists have struggled with accurately measuring water flow through soil for years. Even the smallest soil details can sway water’s path from the straight, sequential line gravity alone might demand. These minute differences contribute to water’s “preferential flow.” For farmers’ crops dependent on moisture, or chemical spills needing containment, preferential flow can be a matter of life or death.

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Scientists know more about how climate change may be affected by the thawing of billions of tons of organic carbon in the Arctic permafrost. climate change happens

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An international research team, led by a Virginia Tech geoscientist, has revealed information about how continents were generated on Earth more than 2.5 billion years ago — and how those processes have continued within the last 70 million years to profoundly affect the planet’s life and climate.

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Research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Rhawn Denniston, professor of geology at Cornell College, and his research team, created a 2,200-year-long record of extreme rainfall events that might also help predict future climate change.

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Researchers have identified a new source of methane for gas hydrates — ice-like substances that trap methane within the crystal structure of frozen water — in the Arctic Ocean. The findings point to a previously undiscovered, stable reservoir for methane that is “locked” away from the atmosphere, where it could impact global climate change.

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By crushing minerals between diamonds, a University of Utah study suggests the existence of an unknown layer inside Earth: part of the lower mantle where the rock gets three times stiffer. The discovery may explain a mystery: why slabs of Earth’s sinking tectonic plates sometimes stall and thicken 930 miles underground.

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Experiments at Z at pressures equalling when worlds collide show that iron vaporizes at far lower pressures than its theoretical value , explaining for the first time iron's widespread distribution in Earth's mantle.

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In this Q&A Andrew Stack, a geochemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, advances understanding of the dynamics of minerals underground. Stack and his team make discoveries that will help to improve our understanding of a wide range of energy-related issues, such as geologic storage of carbon dioxide, oil and gas discovery and development, and remediation of toxic contaminants. His current research spans three disciplines—geology, chemistry and computing.

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Two new papers from members of the MESSENGER Science Team provide global-scale maps of Mercury’s surface chemistry that reveal previously unrecognized geochemical terranes — large regions that have compositions distinct from their surroundings. The presence of these large terranes has important implications for the history of the planet.

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As the anniversary of the most fatal landslide in the history of the continental United States approaches, we are reminded of the importance of evaluating geologic hazards and communicating that information to communities that may be at risk, including Kentucky, where landslides were reported in in Muhlenburg and Caldwell counties this month.

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URI doctoral student Brennan Phillips is on the hunt for underwater volcanoes so he can collect data on the plumes of hot fluids and chemical compounds emanating from hydrothermal vents in and around the craters. His latest adventure took him to the unexplored Kavachi volcano off the Solomon Islands.

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In this Q&A Andrew Stack of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory calls on expertise in geology, chemistry and computing to advance understanding of the dynamics of minerals underground. He investigates chemical processes that take place on mineral surfaces at scales ranging from individual atoms to entire rocks. These processes can trap contaminants, such as nuclear waste, carbon dioxide and toxic by-products from hydraulic fracturing.

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Working at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), researchers studied quartz from the San Andreas Fault at the microscopic scale, the scale at which earthquake-triggering stresses originate. The results could one day lead to a better understanding of earthquake events.

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To predict Earth’s future, geologists use particle accelerators to understand its past.

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A three-dimensional seismic image of the mantle beneath the Lau Basin in the South Pacific just published in Nature has an intriguing anomaly. The image showed the least magma where the scientists expected to find the most. After considerable debate they concluded that magma with a high water content was flushed so rapidly that it wasn't showing up in the images.

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An international team of researchers says climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff have all passed beyond levels that put humanity in a “safe operating space.” Civilization has crossed four of nine so-called planetary boundaries as the result of human activity, according to a report published today in Science by the 18-member research team.

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Chemical analysis of some of the world’s oldest rocks, by an international team led by McGill University researchers, has provided the earliest record yet of Earth's atmosphere. The results show that the air 4 billion years ago was very similar to that more than a billion years later, when the atmosphere -- though it likely would have been lethal to oxygen-dependent humans -- supported a thriving microbial biosphere that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of life on Earth today.

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In North America, European colonization and agriculture led to as much soil loss in just decades as would have occurred naturally in thousands of years, new research shows. Scientists from the University of Vermont and London have, for the first time, precisely quantified natural rates of erosion in ten US river basins to compare with modern ones.

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Diamonds are beautiful and enigmatic. Though chemical reactions that create the highly coveted sparkles still remain a mystery, a professor from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is studying a rare rock covered in diamonds that may hold clues to the gem's origins.

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In a finding that meshes well with recent discoveries from the Rosetta mission, Ohio State University researchers have discovered a geochemical pathway by which Earth makes it own water through plate tectonics. This finding extends the planet's water cycle to billions of years—and suggests that enough water is buried in the deep earth right now to fill the Pacific Ocean.

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Of the many weather-related phenomena that can promote harmful algal blooms, a new study has revealed that one—the wind—is the most important. The finding suggests that environmental agencies will have to incorporate the threat of extreme weather events caused by climate change into efforts to prevent algal blooms.

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Led by University at Buffalo geophysicist Beata Csatho, the project used NASA satellite and aerial data to reconstruct how the ice sheet changed at nearly 100,000 locations over many years.

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The rate at which carbon emissions warmed Earth’s climate almost 56 million years ago resembles modern, human-caused global warming much more than previously believed, but involved two pulses of carbon to the atmosphere, University of Utah researchers and their colleagues found.

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An ancient meteorite and high-energy X-rays have helped scientists conclude a half century of effort to find, identify and characterize a mineral that makes up 38 percent of the Earth.

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Water off Washington’s coast is warming a third of a mile down, where seafloor methane shifts from a frozen solid to a gas. Calculations suggest ocean warming is already releasing significant methane offshore of Alaska to California.

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For seven years, an area larger than the city of Madison has been rising by 10 inches per year. That rapid rise provides a major scientific opportunity: to explore a mega-volcano before it erupts. That effort, and the hazard posed by the restless magma reservoir beneath Laguna del Maule, are described in a major research article in the December issue of GSA Today.

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As much as two-thirds of Earth's carbon may be hidden in the inner core, making it the planet's largest carbon reservoir, according to a new model that even its backers acknowledge is "provocative and speculative."

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Scientists reveal details about carbon deep beneath the Earth’s surface and suggest ways it might have influenced the history of life on the planet.

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The surface of Mars clearly shows what looks like evidence of flowing water: riverbeds, deltas, and the like. But these signs have been a puzzle – until now. The Weizmann Institute’s Dr. Itay Halevy and Brown University’s Dr. James Head III have identified a possible source: violent eruptions from massive volcanoes that periodically melted Mars’ ice.

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Scientific inquiry is a hit and miss proposition, subject to constant checking and rechecking. Recently, a new class of materials was discovered called topological insulators—nonmetallic materials with a metallic surface capable of conducting electrons. The effect, based on relativity theory, exists only in special materials—those with heavy elements—and has the potential to revolutionize electronics.

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An ocean engineer at the University of Rhode Island has found that a massive underwater landslide, not just the 9.0 earthquake, was responsible for triggering the deadly tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011.

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Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences shed new light on multicellular fossils from a time 60 million years before a vast growth spurt of life known as the Cambrian Explosion occurred on Earth.

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Three University of Michigan geologists are participating in an international effort to drill nearly a mile beneath the surface of New Zealand this fall to bring back rock samples from an active fault known to generate major earthquakes.

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Geologists have long debated when and how the Tibetan Plateau reached a 14,000-foot-plus elevation, but new research shows it once was probably thousands of feet higher.

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Iowa State's Franek Hasiuk is using 3-D printing to study the pores within limestone reservoir rocks. A better understanding of the pore networks within the rocks could help industry get at more oil. Hasiuk is also using 3-D printing to engage geology students.

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Conditions on Earth during its first 500 million years may have been cool enough to form oceans of water instead of being too hot for life to form.

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Scientists on a seafloor mapping mission have discovered a new seamount near the Johnson Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The summit of the seamount rises 1,100 meters from the 5,100-meter-deep ocean floor.

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Was Mars — now a cold, dry place — once a warm, wet planet that sustained life? Research underway at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory may one day answer those questions — and perhaps even help pave the way for future colonization of the Red Planet. By analyzing the chemical clues locked inside an ancient Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, Florida State University Professor Munir Humayun and an international research team are revealing the story of Mars’ ancient, and sometimes startling, climate history.

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New questions about geology, oceanography and seafloor ecosystems are being raised because of research by a Mississippi State University geologist.

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Seismic events aren’t rare occurrences on Antarctica, where sections of the frozen desert can experience hundreds of micro-earthquakes an hour due to ice deformation. Some scientists call them icequakes. But in March of 2010, the ice sheets in Antarctica vibrated a bit more than usual because of something more than 3,000 miles away: the 8.8-magnitude Chilean earthquake. A new Georgia Institute of Technology study published in Nature Geoscience is the first to indicate that Antarctica’s frozen ground is sensitive to seismic waves from distant earthquakes.

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Experts sit down to discuss recent findings in crystallography with a Nobel laureate. Reporters are invited to attend the event and ask questions.

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Your teeth can tell stories about you, and not just that you always forget to floss.

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A new geological study concludes.the disastrous March 22 landslide that killed 43 people in the rural Washington state community of Oso involved the "remobilization" of a 2006 landslide on the same hillside.

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The 1500 mile Appalachian mountain chain runs along a nearly straight line from Alabama to Newfoundland—except for a curious bend in Pennsylvania and New York State. Researchers from the College of New Jersey and the University of Rochester now know what caused that bend—a dense, underground block of rigid, volcanic rock forced the chain to shift eastward as it was forming millions of years ago.

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By measuring how fast Earth conducts electricity and seismic waves, a University of Utah researcher and colleagues made a detailed picture of Mount Rainier’s deep volcanic plumbing and partly molten rock that will erupt again someday.