Feature Channels: Geology

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Persistent abnormally hot weather can cause negative impacts on human health, agriculture, and natural environments.

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The loss of forest cover in the Amazon has a significant impact on the local climate in Brazil, according to a new study.

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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.

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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

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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.

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The origin of gigantic magma eruptions that led to global climatic crises and extinctions of species has remained controversial.

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A new study indicates that some exoplanets may have better conditions for life to thrive than Earth itself has.

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34 million years ago the warm 'greenhouse climate' of the dinosaur age ended and the colder 'icehouse climate' of today commenced.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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While it's important to evaluate geoengineering proposals from an informed position, the best way to reduce climate risk is to reduce emissions

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The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai'i recently recorded the highest concentration of carbon dioxide, or CO2, levels in human history.

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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

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Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant, Juske Horita is getting a high-precision water isotope analyzer.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Floating air particles following disasters and other geological events can have a lasting impact on life on Earth, and a new model drawing on chaos theory looks to help predict how these particles move, with an eye toward applications for geoengineering. Using available wind data, Tímea Haszpra developed a model for following particles as they travel around the globe. Using it, she has generated maps that can be used to predict how particles will be dispersed above the world.

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The study is a continuation of a hypothesis that Unto K. Laine, Professor Emeritus, published three years ago on the origin of the sounds heard during the displays of the Northern Lights.

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The males of one species of butterfly are more attracted to females that are active, not necessarily what they look like, according to a recent research conducted at Augustana University.The paper, “Behaviour before beauty: Signal weighting during mate selection in the butterfly Papilio polytes,” found that males of the species noticed the activity levels of potential female mates, not their markings.

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A new paper to be published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History integrates 20 years of research that describes the ancient Trans-Saharan Seaway of Africa and contains the first reconstructions of extinct aquatic species in their habitats along the seaway.

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New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an "umbrella effect".

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Volatile elements in magma, primarily water, drive explosive volcanic eruptions. The tricky part is determining just how much volatile content was present before the eruption took place. This is especially difficult when the only evidence scientists have to go on is the end product after all the volatiles have been lost.

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New research explains why salt crystals are piling up on the deepest parts of the Dead Sea's floor, a finding that could help scientists understand how large salt deposits formed in Earth's geologic past.

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Lifestyle changes can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and help protect nature. While some actions offer great potential

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Irvine, Calif., July 1, 2019 – A catastrophic forest die-off in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range in 2015-2016 was caused by the inability of trees to reach diminishing supplies of subsurface water following years of severe drought and abnormally warm temperatures. That’s the conclusion by researchers from the University of California, Irvine and UC Merced outlined in a study published today in Nature Geoscience.

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A new radioactivity model of Earth’s ancient rocks calls into question current models for the formation of Earth’s continental crust, suggesting continents may have risen out of the sea much earlier than previously thought but were destroyed, leaving little trace.

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Research findings hint at the possibility of PNA on the early earth

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A surprise discovery in a Crimean cave suggests that early Europeans lived alongside some of the largest ever known birds, according to new research published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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The ice worm is one of the largest organisms that spends its entire life in ice and Washington State University scientist Scot Hotalilng is one of the only people on the planet studying it.

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Researchers have discovered 56 previously uncharted subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet bringing the total known number of lakes to 60.

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Multi-fault earthquakes can span fault systems of tens to hundreds of kilometers, with ruptures propagating from one segment to another. During the last decade, seismologists have observed several cases of this complicated type of earthquake rupture, and are now relying on supercomputers to provide detailed models to better understand the fundamental physical processes that take place during these events, which can have far reaching effects.

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Northern Arizona Univeristy assistant professor Cristina Thomas contributed to an observational campaign using a real asteroid to test global response capabilities and co-authored a paper outlining the exercise and its scientific results.

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The unusual appearance of deep-sea fish like the oarfish or slender ribbonfish in Japanese shallow waters does not mean that an earthquake is about to occur, according to a new statistical analysis.

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Growing up riding four-wheelers and collecting rocks near her grandparents’ cabin in the valleys wedged between the Rocky Mountains, Shelby Isom’s childhood was an adventure.

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A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has been working for nearly a decade to uncover new strategies to control the environmentally harmful side effects of modern day farming, including the release of excess nutrients from fertilizers that can pollute local and regional waterways.

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Researchers at the University of Iowa and the United States Geologic Survey report data gathered by orbiting satellites can yield more information about destructive earthquakes and can improve aid and humanitarian response efforts. The researchers looked at satellite data from several recent, large-magnitude earthquakes.

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Extreme erosion of Arctic coastlines in a changing climate - up to a metre a day - has been revealed with drone surveys.

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The tides are turning in a quest to solve an earthquake mystery.