Earliest Signs of Life: Scientists Find Microbial Remains in Ancient Rocks
University of New South WalesScientists have found exceptionally preserved microbial remains in some of Earth's oldest rocks in Western Australia
Scientists have found exceptionally preserved microbial remains in some of Earth's oldest rocks in Western Australia
A satellite on schedule to launch in 2021 could offer a more comprehensive look at flooding in vulnerable, under-studied parts of the world, including much of Africa, South America and Indonesia, a new study has found.
Dr Michael Pittman of the Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory, Department of Earth Sciences
The National Alliance for Water Innovation, which is led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been awarded a five-year, $100-million Energy-Water Desalination Hub by DOE (pending appropriations) to address water security issues in the United States. The Hub will focus on early-stage research and development for energy-efficient and cost-competitive desalination technologies and for treating nontraditional water sources for various end uses.
Phoenix, Arizona, USA: For more than a century, a guiding principle in seismology has been that earthquakes recur at semi-regular intervals according to a "seismic cycle." In this model,
USA: The Sahara Desert is vast, generously dusty, and surprisingly shy about its age.USA: The Sahara Desert is vast, generously dusty, and surprisingly shy about its age. New research looking into what appears to be dust that the Sahara blew over to the Canary Islands is providing the first direct evidence from dry land that the age of the Sahara matches that found in deep-sea sediments: at least 4.6 million years old.
A key theory that attributes the climate evolution of the Earth to the breakdown of Himalayan rocks may not explain the cooling over the past 15 million years, according to a Rutgers-led study. The study in the journal Nature Geoscience could shed more light on the causes of long-term climate change.
Analyzing reflections of seismic pressure waves by the subseafloor geology off southwestern Japan, researchers at Kyushu University have found the first evidence of a massive gas reservoir where the Earth's crust is being separated. Depending on its nature
An internationally respected group of scientists, including Professor Francois Engelbrecht from the University of the Witwatersrand
A University of Queensland-led study has revealed that future demand for ethanol biofuel could potentially expand sugarcane farming land in Brazil by five million hectares by 2030.
A paradox of too much and too little of this necessary nutrient
Photographers and others with a keen eye have noticed that sunrises and sunsets have become a lot more purple in the U.S. New measurements from a high-altitude balloon could explain why.
Coasts, oceans, ecosystems, weather and human health all face impacts from climate change, and now valuable soils may also be affected. Climate change may reduce the ability of soils to absorb water in many parts of the world, according to a Rutgers-led study. And that could have serious implications for groundwater supplies, food production and security, stormwater runoff, biodiversity and ecosystems.
No more than 540 million years ago there was a huge boom in the diversity of animals on Earth. The first larger animals evolved in what is today known as the Cambrian explosion. In the time that followed
A USC scientist and colleagues have identified a new species of giant flying reptile that once soared over what is now North America.
A rocky start in college hasn’t stopped alumnus Zachary Heck (BS Geology, ’16) from pursuing his prehistoric passions. Having a year off due to academic suspension helped him get back on track, giving him time to a begin career in paleontology before he even graduated.
Millions of dollars are spent fortifying dams to withstand earthquakes — but it may not be necessary. New research being conducted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is examining whether or not that spending actually contributes to public safety.
A team of scientists has concluded that earth experienced a previously underestimated severe mass-extinction event, which occurred about 260 million years ago, raising the total of major mass extinctions in the geologic record to six.
A unique new facility launched today at the University of Adelaide will help protect Australia’s precious groundwater from overuse and contamination, and contribute to our understanding of the impact of climate change through measurements on Antarctic ice cores.
Volcanoes are often feared for their destructive power, but a new study reminds us that they can foster new growth.
The NSF has awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego and its partners a three-year, $5.9 million grant to host the EarthCube Office as part of the ongoing NSF-funded EarthCube program aimed at transforming geoscience research.
Late in the prehistoric Silurian Period, around 420 million years ago, a devastating mass extinction event wiped 23 percent of all marine animals from the face of the planet. For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth’s history. Now, researchers from Florida State University have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans.
Persistent abnormally hot weather can cause negative impacts on human health, agriculture, and natural environments.
The loss of forest cover in the Amazon has a significant impact on the local climate in Brazil, according to a new study.
When Friederike Gründger and her team cracked open the long, heavy cylinders of black sediment drawn from the ocean floor, they were surprised to find pockets of yellowish-green slime buried within two of the samples.
Irvine, Calif., Aug. 28, 2019 – An international team of Earth system scientists and oceanographers has created the first high-resolution global map of surface ocean phosphate, a key mineral supporting the aquatic food chain. In doing so, the University of California
At about the same rate that your heart beats, a Utah rock formation called Castleton Tower gently vibrates, keeping time and keeping watch over the sandstone desert. Swaying like a skyscraper, the red rock tower taps into the deep vibrations in the earth—wind, waves and far-off earthquakes.
The origin of gigantic magma eruptions that led to global climatic crises and extinctions of species has remained controversial.
A new study indicates that some exoplanets may have better conditions for life to thrive than Earth itself has.
34 million years ago the warm 'greenhouse climate' of the dinosaur age ended and the colder 'icehouse climate' of today commenced.
New research from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) published Aug. 19, 2019, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science provides evidence of the formation and abundance of abiotic methane—methane formed by chemical reactions that don’t involve organic matter—on Earth and shows how the gases could have a similar origin on other planets and moons, even those no longer home to liquid water. Researchers had long noticed methane released from deep-sea vents. But while the gas is plentiful in the atmosphere where it’s produced by living things, the source of methane at the seafloor was a mystery.
Impact events are relatively common. The objects known as shooting stars are actually small meteors burning up as they pass through Earth’s atmosphere. If a meteor is large enough, some part of it may reach Earth as a meteorite. These small impacts don’t form big craters, even if they might be large enough to devastate urban areas.
An international team of subsurface explorers from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland have uncovered a previously undescribed ‘Jurassic World’ of around 100 ancient volcanoes buried deep within the Cooper-Eromanga Basins of central Australia.
Consecutive low snow years may become six times more common across the Western United States over the latter half of this century, leading to ecological and economic challenges such as expanded fire seasons and poor snow conditions at ski resorts, according to a study.
With the recent earthquakes in early July in southern California, it is more important than ever to be able to accurately predict when and where the next one will occur. A researcher at Missouri S&T is working to do just that by studying past seismic waves produced by earthquakes.
Every several hundred thousand years or so, Earth's magnetic field dramatically shifts and reverses its polarity. New work from University of Wisconsin–Madison geologist Brad Singer and his colleagues finds that the most recent field reversal took several times longer than previously thought, and the results further call into question controversial findings that some reversals could occur within a human lifetime.
A new study of rocks that formed billions of years ago lends fresh insight into how Earth’s plate tectonics, or the movement of large pieces of Earth’s outer shell, evolved over the planet’s 4.56-billion-year history.
While it's important to evaluate geoengineering proposals from an informed position, the best way to reduce climate risk is to reduce emissions
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai'i recently recorded the highest concentration of carbon dioxide, or CO2, levels in human history.
The rise in temperature and precipitation levels in summer in northern Japan has negatively affected the growth of conifers and resulted in their gradual decline
Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant, Juske Horita is getting a high-precision water isotope analyzer.
Approximately 2.4 billion years ago, the Great Oxidation Event, which dramatically increased the oxygen content in Earth’s atmosphere, paved the way for the rise of all lifeforms that use oxygen to break down nutrients for energy. While scientists agree about when the event happened, they are less certain about exactly how it occurred. Now, however, researchers at Missouri S&T say they’ve discovered a possible trigger for the Great Oxidation Event and the arrival of plants and animals on Earth.
Constructed from a quarter century’s worth of satellite data, a new map of Antarctic ice velocity by glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the most precise ever created. Published today in a paper in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters, the map is 10 times more accurate than previous renditions, covering more than 80 percent of the continent.
A volcano will not send out an official invitation when it’s ready to erupt, but a team of researchers suggest that scientists who listen and watch carefully may be able to pick up signs that an eruption is about to happen. In a study of Hawaii's Kīlauea volcano, the researchers reported that pressure changes in the volcano’s summit reservoirs helped explain the number of earthquakes — or seismicity — in the upper East Rift Zone. This zone is a highly active region where several eruptions have occurred over the last few decades, including a spectacular one in 2018.
Protecting crops from pests and pathogens without using toxic pesticides has been a longtime goal of farmers. Researchers at Boyce Thompson Institute have found that compounds from an unlikely source - microscopic soil roundworms - could achieve this aim.
Three teams who applied novel machine learning methods to successfully predict the timing of earthquakes from historic seismic data are splitting $50,000 in prize money from an open, online Kaggle competition hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory and its partners.