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Ice action seems responsible for ancient erosion of rock across the planet. New research provides further evidence that rocks representing up to a billion years…
NASA scientists have been closely watching the evolution of the volcanic island near Tonga since 2015. When a volcano in the South Pacific Kingdom of…
Analysis of the rock record rules out atmospheric oxygen before the Great Oxygenation Event. Evidence arguing for a “whiff of oxygen” before the Earth’s Great…
A new study has found that the mineralogy of the rocks that a meteorite hits, rather than the size of the impact, determines how deadly…
A simulation of the evolution of the Earth’s interior over time, showing the thermal (bottom), chemical (middle), and thermochemical evolution under the simulated conditions. The…
The Libyan Desert is often cited as a Mars analogue. The vast Libyan Desert stretches toward the Mediterranean Sea, which itself fades into the horizon…
A recent study published in Nature Communications finds that piles of sand grains, even when undisturbed, are in constant motion. Using highly-sensitive optical interference data,…
The dusty surface of the moon — immortalized in images of Apollo astronauts’ lunar footprints — formed as the result of asteroid impacts and the…
Team studied thermal inertia to understand how rock layers were formed. As part of a team of collaborators from Northern Arizona University and Johns Hopkins…
Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around…
Seismic data collected in Elysium Planitia, the second largest volcanic region on Mars, suggest the presence of a shallow sedimentary layer sandwiched between lava flows…
Mars explorers searching for signs of ancient life could be fooled by fossil-like specimens created by chemical processes, research suggests. Rocks on Mars may contain…
A study presents a broad survey of monogenetic volcanoes younger than 2.58 million years in the U.S. Southwest. They’re born. They live once, erupting for…
Geologists from the UNIGE and Peking University have developed a technique that makes it possible to estimate the maximum size of a future super-eruption of…
A new analysis of 2.5-billion-year-old rocks from Australia finds that volcanic eruptions may have stimulated population surges of marine microorganisms, creating the first puffs of…
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…
Heat from a comet exploding just above the ground fused the sandy soil into patches of glass stretching 75 kilometers, a study led by Brown…
While analyzing some of the world’s oldest colored gemstones, researchers from the University of Waterloo discovered carbon residue that was once ancient life, encased in…