Feature Channels: Geology

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About 13 million years ago, a distant ancestor of modern apes and humans suffered an untimely death on the arid landscape of northern Kenya. Last year, a Rutgers scientist helped bring its tiny skull to light, filling in a huge gap in the evolutionary record. And on Saturday, members of the public are invited to come face-to-skull with that ancestor, known as “Alesi,” at the Rutgers Geology Museum’s 50th annual Open House event. The museum stands on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Admission is free.

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Tropical forests span a huge area, harbor a wide diversity of species, and are important to water and nutrient cycling. Researchers used high-tech tools to more precisely view where these cleared sites were and the lasting impact they had on the rainforest in the South American Amazon Basin.

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Danny Bowman, a Sandia National Laboratories geophysicist, launched a fleet of five solar-powered hot air balloons last year. They reached a height of 13 to 15 miles, twice as high as commercial jets, and detected the infrasound from a test explosion. Infrasound is sound of very low frequencies, below 20 hertz, which is lower than humans can hear, and can be used to monitor explosions, including those caused by nuclear tests. Bowman is also working with NASA to explore the possibility of sending these balloons to Venus and Jupiter.

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The new study shows that locations that experienced earthquakes are tied in proximity and timeliness to mass waste water injection sites. Further, the study indicates that tracking annual data on the injection well locations can help predict how corresponding earthquake activity will change. This new finding builds on previous studies showing that earthquake activity increases when wastewater injections increase.

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S&T’s Office of Standards understood the need to gather in-depth data to determine how to construct the next-generation icebreaker. To do that, they needed to see, first hand, how changes to the current construct reacted to ice.

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Among the initial 18 scientists selected for French President Emmanuel Macron's "Make Our Planet Great Again" program is Louis Derry, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in Cornell University’s College of Engineering and faculty fellow with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

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Though mass extinctions wiped out staggeringly high numbers of species, they barely touched the overall "functional" diversity--how each species makes a living, be it filtering phytoplankton or eating small crustaceans, burrowing or clamping onto rocks. University of Chicago scientists documented this surprising trend in a study on extinctions published Jan. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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“We’re geeks, and we’re motivated.” That’s how Amin Amooie, a doctoral student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University, explained his team’s efforts to build the supercomputer they’ve dubbed “Buckeye Pi.”

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Tulane University awarded the $1 million grand prize for the Tulane Nitrogen Reduction Challenge to Adapt-N, a team from Cornell University that developed a cloud-based computer modeling system to predict optimum nitrogen application rates for crops using data on weather, field conditions and soil management practices.

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NAU Regents’ Professor Bruce Hungate, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss), recently joined a new initiative lead by LLNL to study how the soil microbiome controls the mechanisms that regulate the stabilization of the organic matter in soil.

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As the August 21 eclipse approached, researchers prepared to understand plants' response to light and temperature. The varied results have left the researchers with interesting questions.

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Australian research scientists and industry are joining together to develop and commercialise new tools using cutting-edge digital technologies including machine learning that they say will be a game-changer for mining and exploration.

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A scientist wants to know more about urban microclimates She’s launched a project to measure neighborhood-to-neighborhood differences in Baltimore, hoping to alert residents, guide city planners and ease some of the impact of climate change.

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The Anthropocene epoch — the proposed name for this time of significant human effect on the planet and its systems — represents a new context in which to study literature. A new book of essays co-edited by a University of Washington English professor argues that literary studies, in turn, also can help us better understand the Anthropocene.

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For his life’s work, Farouk El-Baz will receive the 2018 Inamori Ethics Prize from the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University during a ceremony and academic symposium Sept. 13-14.

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Geologists have corrected a mix-up that made an ancient geological structure in the central U.S. seem hundreds of miles shorter than it really is. The biggest failed rift known to geologists is even bigger than originally thought, according to research that will be presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Dec. 11 in New Orleans.

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Two Vanderbilt experts show evidence that progress can continue to be made on climate change and other environmental issues regardless of what the government is doing.

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Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown for the first time that dark fiber – the vast network of unused fiber-optic cables installed throughout the country and the world – can be used as sensors for detecting earthquakes, the presence of groundwater, changes in permafrost conditions, and a variety of other subsurface activity.

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Most volcanoes erupt beneath the ocean, but scientists know little about them compared to what they know about volcanoes that eject their lava on dry land. Researchers think that with improved monitoring, they can learn more about these submarine eruptions, which threaten travel and alter the ocean soundscape. During the 174th ASA meeting, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Gabrielle Tepp of the USGS will discuss the challenges and benefits of remote monitoring and what it can teach about submarine volcanoes.

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There are out-of-the-way places. There are remote places. Then there are places like the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, where the nearest human being – possibly, the nearest living organism – is at least 150 miles away. That’s where Rutgers University-New Brunswick planetary geologist Juliane Gross will spend six to eight weeks, beginning in December. An associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, she will recover meteorites for the Case Western Reserve University's Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

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Slowly but steadily, an enormous mass of warm rock is rising beneath part of New England, although a major volcanic eruption isn’t likely for millions of years, a Rutgers University-led study suggests. The research is unprecedented in its scope and challenges textbook concepts of geology.

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Researchers at the University of New Hampshire are using scientific sleuthing to better understand the journey of magma in Mount Etna, to create a more accurate picture of the volcano’s plumbing system and determine how quickly the magma rises to the top to cause an eruption. Their findings contribute to our understanding of how and when volcanoes erupt.

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The amount of biomass – life – in Earth's ancient oceans may have been limited due to low recycling of the key nutrient phosphorus, according to new research by the University of Washington and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

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Volcanism is sometimes like food poisoning, where the Earth spews forth unstable material. New research from Michigan Technological University, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and ETH Zurich shows that a significant pulse of volatile carbon was released from the Earth’s mantle around 500 million years ago. But why?

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WASHINGTON _ Dr. Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe of Missouri University of Science and Technology has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for her contributions to the advancement of palynology ─ the study of organic-walled microfossils such as pollen and spores ─ and her outstanding efforts in educating the next generation of Earth scientists.

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A team of researchers, including a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow from Washington University in St. Louis, found that oxygen levels appear to increase at about the same time as a three-fold increase in biodiversity during the Ordovician Period, between 445 and 485 million years ago, according to a study published Nov. 20 in Nature Geoscience.

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Acoustical waves and vibrations allow us to hear and experience the world with fuller sensory stimulation. Acoustics has applications that cover a broad spectrum of topics including anthropogenic noise in marine environments, the dangers of hospital noise, and auditory sensitivity after drinking. The Acoustical Society of America’s fall meeting this year will showcase the diversity of sound and its applications, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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A geospatial analysis determined the optimal distribution of sites needed to reliably estimate Alaska’s vast soil carbon.

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If someone cries "Eureka!" because it looks like oxygen appeared in Earth's ancient atmosphere long before the body of evidence indicated, consider this: If it was a chromium isotope system reading that caused the enthusiasm, it might need to be curbed.

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A tiny aquatic plant called duckweed might be a viable option for remove phosphorus, nitrates, nitrites and even heavy metals from lakes, ponds and slow-moving waterbodies.

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One of the saltiest bodies on Earth, an analog to how water might exist on Mars, shows signs of being one piece of a larger aquifer.

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Prehistoric polar forests were built for survival, but were not hardy enough to live in ultra-high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. A UWM geologist is studying the tree fossil record in Antarctica from a mass extinction 250 million years ago, looking for clues to how greenhouse gases affected plants -- then and now.

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Crowdsourcing created an online photography archive, financed a British rock band’s tour and advanced a search for intelligent life on other planets. Now a biologist is hoping the approach can help her find rocks. But not just any rocks.

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Rural counties continue to rank lowest among counties across the U.S., in terms of health outcomes. A group of national organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National 4-H Council are leading the way to close the rural health gap.

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Using a sophisticated computer model, scientists have demonstrated for the first time that a new research approach to geoengineering could potentially be used to limit Earth’s warming to a specific target while reducing some of the risks and concerns identified in past studies, including uneven cooling of the globe.

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Long Valley, California, has long defined the “super-eruption.” About 765,000 years ago, a pool of molten rock exploded into the sky. Within one nightmarish week, 760 cubic kilometers of lava and ash spewed out in the kind of volcanic cataclysm we hope never to witness. A new study shows that the giant body of magma — molten rock — at Long Valley was much cooler before the eruption than previously thought.

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Mark Golitko, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, worked with colleagues from the Field Museum in Chicago and institutes in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea to study the Aitape skull and the area it was found in.

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The largest number yet of detailed simulations for how a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake might play out provides a clearer picture of what the region can expect when the fault unleashes a 9.0 earthquake.

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Scientists around Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna are in search of unique biosignatures, which are left on synthetic extraterrestrial minerals by microbial activity. The biochemist and astrobiologist investigates these signatures at her own miniaturized "Mars farm" where she can observe interactions between the archaeon Metallosphaera sedula and Mars-like rocks. These microbes are capable of oxidizing and integrating metals into their metabolism. The original research was currently published in the journal "Frontiers in Microbiology".

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Carbon dioxide measured by a NASA satellite pinpoints sources of the gas from human and volcanic activities, which may help monitor greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

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Viruses exist amidst all bacteria, usually in a 10-fold excess and include virophages which live in giant viruses and use their machinery to replicate and spread. In Nature Communications, a team including DOE JGI researchers reports effectively doubling the number of known virophages.

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New research published in the open access peer-reviewed journal PeerJ uses law enforcement data collected from 2010 to 2015 to understand the geographical distribution of the illegal use of natural resources across the region’s protected area network.

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University of Utah scientists have mapped the near-surface geology around Old Faithful, revealing the reservoir of heated water that feeds the geyser’s surface vent and how the ground shaking behaves in between eruptions. The map was made possible by a dense network of portable seismographs and by new seismic analysis techniques.

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When a normally cold stream in Iceland was warmed, the make-up of life inside changed as larger organisms thrived while smaller ones struggled. The findings carry implications for life in a warming climate.

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Explosive volcanic eruptions in the tropics can lead to El Niño events, those notorious warming periods in the Pacific Ocean with dramatic global impacts on the climate, according to a new study.