In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the center of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean.
The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Jennifer Lotz as the Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Dr. Lotz will begin her five-year appointment as STScI Director starting February 12, 2024.
The planet’s demand for salt comes at a cost to the environment and human health, according to a new scientific review led by University of Maryland Geology Professor Sujay Kaushal.
Beta-diversity of biological assemblages is central to biogeography and ecology. Researchers from Illinois State Museum in the US and Chongqing University in China have presented a set of novel global maps showing geographic patterns of genus-based beta-diversity of flowering plants.
Long before Antarctica froze over, rivers carved valleys through mountains in the continent’s east. Millions of years later, researchers have discovered a remnant of this ancient highland landscape thanks to an aerial survey campaign led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).
A study from an international team led by researchers from Nagoya University in Japan and the University of New Hampshire in the United States has revealed the importance of the Earth’s upper atmosphere in determining how large geomagnetic storms develop.
Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have successfully isolated a pattern of lab-made ‘foreshock’ tremors. The finding offers hope that future earthquakes could be forecast by the swarm of smaller tremors that come before them.
NASA sensors scattered across land, sea, and space have collected hundreds of terabytes of Earth science data over the past four decades. Imagine if a digital assistant like Alexa or Siri, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), could quickly and easily sift through that data to answer scientific questions for researchers.
The research team, led by Durham University, UK, used satellite data and radio-echo sounding techniques to map a 32,000 km2 area of land underneath the vast ice sheet.
Sandia National Laboratories is collaborating with New Mexico-based CSolPower LLC to develop an affordable method of storing energy from renewable sources. The primary goal of the partnership is to transition to zero-carbon solar and wind energy for generating electricity.
Diamonds contain evidence of the mantle rocks that helped buoy and grow the ancient supercontinent Gondwana from below, according to new research from a team of scientists led by Suzette Timmerman.
New research focused on the quantum structure of elements under extreme conditions has implications for understanding Earth's evolution, interpreting unusual seismic signals, and even the study of exoplanets for insights into habitability.
Often introduced unintentionally by human activities, invasive alien species can outcompete and overwhelm native flora and fauna, driving species to the brink of extinction and disrupting the balance of ecosystems
In a ground-breaking first, researchers have carried out hyper-gravity experiment of solute transport in 3D printed fracture network model with geotechnical centrifuge under hyper-gravity environment. This study not only validated the stability of contaminant transport in 3D printed fracture model under high hyper-gravity, but verified the feasibility of using geotechnical centrifuge modeling technique to evaluate the long-term barrier performance of low-permeability fractured rocks.
A global team of scientists have announced the results of an unprecedented collaboration to search for the source of the largest ever seismic event recorded on Mars. The study, led by the University of Oxford, rules out a meteorite impact, suggesting instead that the quake was the result of enormous tectonic forces within Mars’ crust.
By: Patty Cox | Published: October 12, 2023 | 11:02 am | Florida State University scientists have uncovered answers to a conundrum in Earth’s history: Why did marine life experience an extraordinary boom millions of years ago?Scientists have long been puzzled about what triggered this explosion of life and a remarkable increase in the diversity of marine species during the Ordovician Period roughly 487 to 443 million years ago.
Utrecht University geologist Suzanna van de Lagemaat has reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. Her colleagues in Utrecht had predicted its existence over 10 years ago based on fragments of old tectonic plates found deep in the Earth’s mantle.
The Grand Canyon’s valleys and millions of years of rock layers spanning Earth’s history have earned it a designation as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.
A new attempt to predict earthquakes with the aid of artificial intelligence has raised hopes that the technology could one day be used to limit earthquakes’ impact on lives and economies. Developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, the AI algorithm correctly predicted 70% of earthquakes a week before they happened during a seven-month trial in China.
New research reaffirms that human footprints found in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, date to the Last Glacial Maximum, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought.
To bridge the knowledge gap between volcanologists and atmospheric scientists working on climate change and observing global systems, Cornell researchers have characterized volcanic ash samples from many explosive eruptions of a broad compositional range.
Toshifumi Sugama--a chemist in the Interdisciplinary Science Department at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory who designs, develops, and evaluates materials for geothermal wells--received the Outstanding Research Award from Geothermal Rising, a non-profit organization advocating for the advancement of geothermal energy around the world.
Two renewable energy approaches—enhanced geothermal systems and floating offshore wind energy—get new focus as Energy Earthshot™ Research Centers at PNNL.
In February, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the Turkey-Syria border, followed by one nearly as large nine hours later. Shallow faults less than 18 miles beneath the surface buckled and ruptured, causing violent focused quakes that leveled thousands of buildings and killed tens of thousands.
New research from the University of Oregon unpacks the geology behind lore, showing how seismically active faults on either side of the straight interact to create a narrow marine passage filled with geologic hazards.
Lava worlds, massive exoplanets home to sparkling skies and roiling volcanic seas called magma oceans, are distinctly unlike the planets in our solar system.
For the past five years, a history professor has been working with a community in Guatemala to ensure that its water supply is safe. Recently, he received a national grant to continue this work.
A team including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Raluca Rufu recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice.
The University of Oregon-led, multi-institution center will advance understanding of the Cascadia subduction zone and improve earthquake resiliency in the Pacific Northwest.
In the United States, tens of millions of people live behind levees, but historically disadvantaged groups are more likely to live behind subpar levees and have fewer resources to maintain critical levee infrastructure, a new study reveals.
As global ice dams begin to weaken due to warming temperatures, a new study suggests that prior attempts to evaluate the mass of the huge floating ice shelves that line the Antarctic ice sheet may have overestimated their thickness.
The rapid sea level rise and resulting retreat of coastal habitat seen at the end of the last Ice Age could repeat itself if global average temperatures rise beyond certain levels, according to an analysis by an international team of scientists from more than a dozen institutions, including Rutgers.
A new New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics paper out today describes the 266 fossil species as one of the richest and most diverse groups of three-million-year-old fauna ever found in New Zealand.
A University of South Florida geoscientist led an international team of researchers to create a new method that can reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from flight MH370.
The entire contiguous U.S. has experienced massive urban expansions and the Atlantic Coast shows outstandingly high rates. Urban expansion has substantially squeezed the space of tidal flats and affected surrounding environments. In new urban areas, tidal flats have undergone considerable degeneration with more significant patterns as they get closer to new urban locations. Tidal flats protect against the ocean’s destructive powers such as hurricanes. Without some inland spaces to move around, they will likely disappear, which will have dire consequences for beachfront communities.
A new study led by Georgia Tech shows that water underneath glaciers may surge due to thinning ice sheets — a dangerous feedback cycle that could increase glacial melt, sea level rise, and biological disturbances.
For over 150 years, Missouri University of Science and Technology has been a leader in the field of mineral recovery, and that continued to be the case last week when the university hosted the third annual Resilient Supply of Critical Minerals national workshop.
Farmers around the world could help the planet reach a key carbon removal goal set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by mixing crushed volcanic rocks into their fields, a new study reports.
New research confirms fracking causes slow, small earthquakes or tremors, whose origin was previously a mystery to scientists. The tremors are produced by the same processes that could create large, damaging earthquakes.
A telecommunications fiber optic cable deployed offshore of Oliktok Point, Alaska recorded ambient seismic noise that can be used to finely track the formation and retreat of sea ice in the area, researchers report in The Seismic Record.
The surface of Mars, unlike the Earth's, is not constantly renewed by plate tectonics. This has resulted in the preservation of huge areas of terrain remarkable for their abundance in fossil rivers and lakes dating back billions of years.