Earth's core, the deepest part of our planet, is characterized by extremely high pressure and temperature. It is composed of a liquid outer core and solid inner core.
In a new University of Houston study using an advanced remote imaging system known as synthetic aperture radar interferometry, three glaciers at the South Pole are being documented with levels of clarity and completeness never seen before.
Giant mountain ranges at least as high as the Himalayas and stretching up to 8,000 kilometres across entire supercontinents played a crucial role in the evolution of early life on Earth, according to a new study by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU).
A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle. The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of tectonic plates is related to convection currents in the Earth's mantle.
New Curtin University research has confirmed the frequency of asteroid collisions that formed impact craters on Mars has been consistent over the past 600 million years.
The transport of carbon dioxide stored in the Earth’s lithospheric mantle beneath the Hyblean Plateau in southern Italy at a depth of approximately 50 to 150 kilometres is responsible for the exceptionally large CO2 emission of Mount Etna.
University of Miami experts provide insights on the powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano, an event geologists are calling the biggest recorded anywhere in the world in more than three decades.
The evolution of our Earth is the story of its cooling: 4.5 billion years ago, extreme temperatures prevailed on the surface of the young Earth, and it was covered by a deep ocean of magma.
Florida State University researchers have new insight into the complicated puzzle of environmental conditions that characterized the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME), which killed about 85% of the species in the ocean.
The Matterhorn appears as an immovable, massive mountain. A study shows that this impression is wrong. The Matterhorn is instead constantly in motion, swaying gently back and forth about once every two seconds.
Despite its prior status as a luxury commodity, silver became widely used for coinage in the Roman world from the 7th century BCE onward and provided a standardized monetary system for ancient Mediterranean civilizations.
Computer models of water and land help scientists understand the effects of fire, drought, and human activity, but these models are challenging to build, especially in complex landscapes like the Arctic tundra. Scientists have developed a new mathematical formulation that enables models to predict water runoff in these complex landscapes. This approach will also advance researchers’ ability to predict how surface and subsurface water flow will change over time in a given watershed.
Sophisticated analysis of a rock sample taken from the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission revealed new information about the complex cooling and evolutionary history of the Moon.
The moon may be a mostly uniform expanse of gray, but if you look closely, you can still find a few nooks and crannies in its surface, from deep trenches to pits and maybe even caves.
A clay mineral known as smectite could hold a substantial portion of the water missing from Mars, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
New research from Queen’s University Belfast has led to 184 deep-sea species being added to the global Red List of Threatened Species. With almost two-thirds of the species assessed listed as threatened, it highlights the urgent need to protect them from extinction.
Climate change and warmer conditions have altered snow-driven extremes and previous studies predict less and slower snowmelt in the northern United States and Canada. However, mixed-phase precipitation—shifting between snow and rain—is increasing, especially in higher elevations, making it more challenging to predict future snowmelt, a dominant driver of severe flooding. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire took a closer look at previous studies, and because geographical areas respond differently to climate change, they found future snowmelt incidences could vary greatly by the late 21st century. Snowmelt could decrease over the continental U.S. and southern Canada but increase in Alaska and northern Canada resulting in larger flooding vulnerabilities and possibly causing major societal and economic consequences including costly infrastructure failures.
Since the tsunami that devastated coasts around the Indian Ocean in December 2004 and the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, people worldwide are aware that geological processes in the ocean can cause significant damage.
An international team of researchers including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York will drill into the ocean floor to discover the West Antarctic Ice Sheet's sensitivity to global warming.
Developed by scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory in the Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute, the technology provides insight into how to cost-effectively separate in-demand rare-earth elements.
Leading a team of researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, Dilip Gersappe has secured two grants, totaling $9 million over the next four years to explore and validate the potential of replacing cement, which is environmentally expensive, with naturally derived biopolymers to increase the structural stability of soil.
A Cornell University geochemist has helped discover solid evidence that connects the geochemical fingerprint of the Galápagos plume with mantle materials underneath Panama and Costa Rica – documenting the course of a mantle plume that flows sideways through upper portions of the Earth.
Volcanic gases are helping researchers track large-scale movements in Earth’s deep interior. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists, together with a group of international collaborators, have discovered anomalous geochemical compositions beneath Panama.
After the natural warming that followed the last Ice Age, there were repeated periods when masses of icebergs broke off from Antarctica into the Southern Ocean.
The ice sheets of Greenland are melting at an alarming rate. This causes large amounts of freshwater to flow into the North Atlantic, thereby slowing the Gulf Stream.
UNLV geochemists have discovered a new mineral on the surface of the Earth. Coined "davemaoite" and entrapped in a diamond, the mineral traveled from a depth of at least 410 miles deep within the Earth's lower mantle.
Princeton researchers have solved a 54-year-old puzzle about why certain fluids strangely slow down under pressure when flowing through porous materials, such as soils and sedimentary rocks.
Angie Macias, a doctoral student at West Virginia University, and Matt Kasson, an associate professor, are part of a National Geographic-funded project to study the fungal diversity associated with fungus-feeding millipedes.
The landscape of the southwestern U.S. is heavily scarred by past eruptions of monogenetic volcanoes, and a new study marks a step toward understanding future risks for the region.
Scientists from Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories have just begun the third phase of a years-long experiment to understand how salt and very salty water behave near hot nuclear waste containers in a salt-bed repository.Salt’s unique physical properties can be used to provide safe disposal of radioactive waste, said Kristopher Kuhlman, a Sandia geoscientist and technical lead for the project.
Rivers flowing from the Tibetan Plateau and the surrounding high Asian mountains which support one-third of the world’s population have experienced rapid increases in annual water and sediment runoff since the 1990s, and the volume of sediment washed downstream could more than double by 2050 under the worst-case scenario, a team of scientists has found.
To examine the impact of a warmer and wetter climate in High Mountain Asia, Professor Lu Xixi and Dr Dongfeng Li from the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences led an international team of researchers to conduct a new analysis of observations of headwater rivers in the area. The study revealed that fluvial sediment loads have been increasing substantially, even much faster than river water discharge. This has important implications for water quality, hydropower development and maintenance, and for the riverine carbon cycle.
Water is a scarce commodity in many countries worldwide, but new cost effective technology pioneered by researchers in Australia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia could ensure sustainable water supplies for decades to come.
While analyzing some of the world’s oldest coloured gemstones, researchers from the University of Waterloo discovered carbon residue that was once ancient life, encased in a 2.5 billion-year-old ruby.
New research led by Flinders University is renewing calls to protect the source of water and aquifers supporting the ecologically significant Doongmabulla Springs Complex in central Queensland from a proposed Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin.
Britney Schmidt is in Antarctica through February 2022 with a small team of researchers to explore the confluence of glaciers, floating ice shelves and ocean using a submarine robot called Icefin – the first mission of its kind. But the whole time, she’ll also be thinking about worlds beyond Earth.
Multidisciplinary team of materials physicists and geophysicists combine theoretical predictions, simulations, and seismic tomography to find spin transition in the Earth’s mantle. Their findings will improve understanding of the Earth’s interior, and help elucidate the impact of this phenomenon on tectonic events including volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
Recent research into the way cracks in the earth’s crust open and close along the San Andreas Fault has yielded a new way of studying earthquake behavior that bridges an important gap between laboratory experiments and earth observations, demonstrating a new way to study upper crustal behavior.
Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake.
Over time, concrete cracks and crumbles. Well, most concrete cracks and crumbles. Structures built in ancient Rome are still standing, exhibiting remarkable durability despite conditions that would devastate modern concrete.
One of these structures is the large cylindrical tomb of first-century noblewoman Caecilia Metella. New research shows that the quality of the concrete of her tomb may exceed that of her male contemporaries’ monuments because of the volcanic aggregate the builders chose and the unusual chemical interactions with rain and groundwater with that aggregate over two millennia.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a method to determine the orientation of mechanical stress in the earth’s crust without relying on data from earthquakes or drilling.