Feature Channels: Geology

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Chimpanzees who travel are more frequent tool users, according to new findings from the University of Neuchâtel and the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to be published in eLife.

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A study of nearly 22,000 fossils finds that ancient plankton communities began changing in important ways as much as 400,000 years before massive die-offs ensued during one of Earth’s great mass extinctions. This turmoil, in a time of ancient climate change, could hold lessons for the modern world.

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Every now and then in Earth's history, a pair of continents draws close enough to form one. There comes a time, however, when they must inevitably part ways.

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A huge earthquake may be building beneath Bangladesh, the most densely populated nation on earth. Scientists say they have new evidence of increasing strain there, where two tectonic plates underlie the world's largest river delta. They estimate that at least 140 million people in the region could be affected if the boundary ruptures; the destruction could come not only from the direct results of shaking, but changes in the courses of great rivers, and in the level of land already perilously close to sea level.

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The UTEP Department of Geological Sciences IBA Team took first place in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Worldwide Imperial Barrel Competition in Calgary, Canada.

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Deliberately flooding riverbeds left parched by dams has great potential to restore wetlands, but may also have a significant unintended consequence: the release of greenhouse gases.

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During the Ordovician period, the concentration of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere was about eight times higher than today. It has been hard to explain why the climate cooled and why the Ordovician glaciations took place. A new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that the weathering of rock caused by early non-vascular plants had the potential to cause such a global cooling effect.

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A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth's mantle flows beneath the ocean's tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal Nature, appear to upend a common belief that the strongest deformation in the mantle is controlled by large-scale movement of the plates. Instead, the highest resolution imaging yet reveals smaller-scale processes at work that have more powerful effects.

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University of Florida geochemist Andrea Dutton and colleagues at the University of Michigan have utilized a new technique of analysis to reconstruct Antarctic ocean temperatures that support the idea that the combined impacts of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact brought about one of Earth’s biggest mass extinctions 66 million years ago.

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On Independence Day, a NASA spacecraft will enter Jupiter's orbit, and the University of Iowa has an instrument along for the ride. The Plasma Waves Instrument, designed and built at the UI, will sample plasma waves and learn how Jupiter's intense auroras are produced.

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Crucial peatlands carbon-sink vulnerable to rising sea levels, research shows

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he discovery of manganese oxides in Martian rocks might tell us that the Red Planet was once more Earth-like than previously believed.

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Two massive blob-like structures lie deep within the Earth, roughly on opposite sides of the planet. The two structures, each the size of a continent and 100 times taller than Mount Everest, sit on the core, 1,800 miles deep, and about halfway to the center of the Earth.

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The lava-making operation — one of the largest in the world — will provide a rare, close-up view of the interplay between molten rock and water, an interaction that can enhance the explosive potential of volcanoes.

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Even with this winter's strong El Niño, the Sierra Nevada snowpack will likely take until 2019 to return to pre-drought levels, according to a new analysis led by UCLA hydrology researchers.

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A study of the Caribbean Sea by University of Liverpool ocean scientists has revealed that, in the midst of all the noise of the ocean, this region behaves like a whistle, which blows so loudly that it can be 'heard' from space in the form of oscillations of the Earth's gravity field.

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An international team of scientists has developed a relatively simple mathematical explanation for the rogue ocean waves that can develop seemingly out of nowhere to sink ships and overwhelm oil platforms with walls of water as much as 25 meters high.

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An array of GPS instruments near the San Andreas Fault System in Southern California detects constant motion of Earth's crust--sometimes large, sudden motion during an earthquake and often subtle, creeping motion. By carefully analyzing the data recorded by the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory's GPS array researchers from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM), University of Washington and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) discovered nearly 125 mile-wide "lobes" of uplift and subsidence--a few millimeters of motion each year--straddling the fault system. This large scale motion was previously predicted in models but until now had not been documented.

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The collective estimated amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere from 140 coal mines across Pennsylvania is the equivalent to that of a small power plant, a new West Virginia University study finds.

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Giant Ice Age species including elephant-sized sloths and powerful sabre-toothed cats ¬that once roamed the windswept plains of Patagonia, southern South America, were finally felled by a perfect storm of a rapidly warming climate and humans, a new study has shown.

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Environmental scientists from the University of Stirling have found beech forests across western Europe are increasingly at risk from drought - with areas of southern England worst affected.

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University of Wyoming researchers have joined colleagues from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to study the potential for retrieving rare earth elements from water produced in oil and gas production and geothermal projects

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MISSOULA, Montana - A University of Montana researcher is part of a team whose research is breaking ground on the complexity of earthquakes and the possibility to forecast them. The journal Nature Geoscience features their research online at http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2734.html.

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An ancient basin hidden beneath the Greenland ice sheet, discovered by researchers at the University of Bristol, may help explain the location, size and velocity of Jakobshavn Isbræ, Greenland's fastest flowing outlet glacier.

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Residents of Wink and neighboring Kermit have grown accustomed to the two giant sinkholes that sit between their small West Texas towns.

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Basalt from a common type of volcano shows a surprising contribution from the descending oceanic plate. Analyses show that magnesium atoms are somehow drawn out of the crust, deep below the surface.

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Researchers at the University of Sheffield have provided a unique glimpse into one of the least understood environments on Earth by revealing for the first time former subglacial lakes and their drainage routes beneath the North American ice sheets.

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Earth scientists in the College of Arts and Sciences are changing the way they study the geological record, thanks to new advances in three-dimensional modeling.

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A special issue of the academic journal Deep-sea Research II, published recently, is devoted to expanding understanding of the global issue of chemical munitions dumped at sea. The publication was edited by Margo Edwards, interim director of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's (UHM) Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, and Jacek Beldowski, Science for Peace and Security MODUM ("Towards the Monitoring of Dumped Munitions Threat") project director at the Polish Academy of Sciences--two international leaders in the assessment of sea-dumped military munitions and chemical warfare; and the effects on the ocean environment and those who use it.

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Using laboratory techniques to mimic the conditions found deep inside the Earth, a team of Carnegie scientists led by Ho-Kwang "Dave" Mao has identified a form of iron oxide that they believe could explain seismic and geothermal signatures in the deep mantle. Their work is published in Nature.

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The ancient underwater remains of what was thought to be a long lost Greek city, found close to the holiday island Zakynthos, were in fact created by a naturally occurring phenomenon up to five million years ago.

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Geophysical monitoring of the ground above active supervolcanoes shows that it rises and falls as magma moves beneath the surface of the Earth. Silica-rich magmas like those in the Yellowstone region and along the western margin of North and South America can erupt violently and explosively, throwing vast quantities of ash into the air, followed by slower flows of glassy, viscous magma.

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Fate of region's large carbon reserves could affect greenhouse gas concentration.

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A weedy plant found on the roadside in northern Australia has stems ripe for biofuel production. Scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls at the University of Adelaide have discovered that a variety of sorghum growing wild in Australia, Arun, has the potential to yield over 10,000 litres of bioethanol per hectare per year.

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A Utah mountainside collapsed 4,800 years ago in a gargantuan landslide known as a “rock avalanche,” creating the flat floor of what is now Zion National Park by damming the Virgin River to create a lake that existed for 700 years.

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Deep in vents on the ocean floor, methane-producing microbes feed off chemical reactions between water and rock. Now evidence of this process has been found on land in a freshwater spring in California.

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Using aquatic leaf waxes as a record of ancient precipitation, scientists find that snowfall at a key location in western Greenland may have intensified from 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, when the planet’s Northern Hemisphere was warmer than it is today.

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A school has joined a landmark health research project at the University of Louisville designed to use nature to tackle the health impact of busy city streets

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New geologic mapping in the Himalayan mountains of Kashmir between Pakistan and India suggests that the region is ripe for a major earthquake that could endanger the lives of as many as a million people.

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The National Science Foundation just announced that Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa will receive grant money that will enable Cornell geologist Rhawn Denniston to continue his studies on past climate research. The grant will also provide support for student involvement in the research.

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Earth scientists from Rice University, Yale University and the University of Tokyo are offering a new answer to the long-standing question of how our planet acquired its oxygenated atmosphere.

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Protecting Sea Turtles, Juvenile Sea Stars, Wildfires to Increase in Alaska, and more in the Environment News Source

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World’s first known multicellular green plant made its debut more than 500 million years ago.

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NMSU researchers have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the origins of magma in the Cascade Arc.

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In 2012, the United States experienced the warmest spring on record followed by the most severe drought since the Dust Bowl. A team of scientists used a network of Ameriflux sites to map the carbon flux across the United States during the drought.