New research from the University of Oregon unpacks the geology behind lore, showing how seismically active faults on either side of the straight interact to create a narrow marine passage filled with geologic hazards.
Lava worlds, massive exoplanets home to sparkling skies and roiling volcanic seas called magma oceans, are distinctly unlike the planets in our solar system.
For the past five years, a history professor has been working with a community in Guatemala to ensure that its water supply is safe. Recently, he received a national grant to continue this work.
A team including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Raluca Rufu recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice.
The University of Oregon-led, multi-institution center will advance understanding of the Cascadia subduction zone and improve earthquake resiliency in the Pacific Northwest.
In the United States, tens of millions of people live behind levees, but historically disadvantaged groups are more likely to live behind subpar levees and have fewer resources to maintain critical levee infrastructure, a new study reveals.
As global ice dams begin to weaken due to warming temperatures, a new study suggests that prior attempts to evaluate the mass of the huge floating ice shelves that line the Antarctic ice sheet may have overestimated their thickness.
The rapid sea level rise and resulting retreat of coastal habitat seen at the end of the last Ice Age could repeat itself if global average temperatures rise beyond certain levels, according to an analysis by an international team of scientists from more than a dozen institutions, including Rutgers.
A new New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics paper out today describes the 266 fossil species as one of the richest and most diverse groups of three-million-year-old fauna ever found in New Zealand.
A University of South Florida geoscientist led an international team of researchers to create a new method that can reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from flight MH370.
The entire contiguous U.S. has experienced massive urban expansions and the Atlantic Coast shows outstandingly high rates. Urban expansion has substantially squeezed the space of tidal flats and affected surrounding environments. In new urban areas, tidal flats have undergone considerable degeneration with more significant patterns as they get closer to new urban locations. Tidal flats protect against the ocean’s destructive powers such as hurricanes. Without some inland spaces to move around, they will likely disappear, which will have dire consequences for beachfront communities.
A new study led by Georgia Tech shows that water underneath glaciers may surge due to thinning ice sheets — a dangerous feedback cycle that could increase glacial melt, sea level rise, and biological disturbances.
For over 150 years, Missouri University of Science and Technology has been a leader in the field of mineral recovery, and that continued to be the case last week when the university hosted the third annual Resilient Supply of Critical Minerals national workshop.
Farmers around the world could help the planet reach a key carbon removal goal set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by mixing crushed volcanic rocks into their fields, a new study reports.
New research confirms fracking causes slow, small earthquakes or tremors, whose origin was previously a mystery to scientists. The tremors are produced by the same processes that could create large, damaging earthquakes.
A telecommunications fiber optic cable deployed offshore of Oliktok Point, Alaska recorded ambient seismic noise that can be used to finely track the formation and retreat of sea ice in the area, researchers report in The Seismic Record.
The surface of Mars, unlike the Earth's, is not constantly renewed by plate tectonics. This has resulted in the preservation of huge areas of terrain remarkable for their abundance in fossil rivers and lakes dating back billions of years.
When predicting the future, some people use a crystal ball or tarot cards. When Missouri University of Science and Technology geologist Dr. Jonathan Obrist-Farner does it, he uses sediment core samples.
Arctic sea ice, an important component of the Earth system, is disappearing fast under climate warming. Summer sea ice is anticipated to vanish entirely within this century.
Geoscientists have long thought that water – along with shallow magma stored in Earth’s crust – drives volcanoes to erupt. Now, thanks to newly developed research tools at Cornell, scientists have learned that gaseous carbon dioxide can trigger explosive eruptions.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has partnered with another national lab and a seismic instrumentation monitoring company to develop a physics-based seismic-forecasting software platform to help operators and regulators better understand and manage seismic hazards at carbon storage sites.
Catastrophic dynamic rock failure (rockburst) is one of the most challenging problems existing in the fields of civil tunnelling and mining. The outcomes of this study advance the understanding of rockburst in the industry, by defining the magnitude of energy that is required to cause a burst in a given geotechnical and mining domain and its release mechanisms.
Gems' unique elemental composition and atomic orientation act as a fingerprint, enabling researchers to uncover the stones’ past, and with it, historical trade routes. In AIP Advances, Khedr et al. employ three modern spectroscopic techniques to rapidly analyze gems found in the Arabian-Nubian Shield and compare them with similar gems from around the world. The authors identified elements that influence gems’ color, differentiated stones found within and outside the region, and distinguished natural from synthetic.
Although the location of St. Croix is perfect for a VLBA antenna, the island poses significant challenges for using and maintaining a radio antenna. The St. Croix dish is located on the eastern side of the island, almost at sea level. So it is constantly bombarded by salt air, ocean rains, and even the occasional tropical storm.
Steamboat Geyser’s spray slowly fossilizes the trees it lands on – preserving the geyser’s past and providing a glimpse into Steamboat’s uncertain future.
An international research team, led by Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Manitoba and University of Copenhagen, has reached a significant milestone by drilling through 2670 m of ice on the North Greenland Ice Stream and reaching bedrock after seven long years.
Earth is truly unique among our Solar System’s planets. It has vast water oceans and abundant life. But Earth is also unique because it is the only planet with plate tectonics, which shaped its geology, climate and possibly influenced the evolution of life.
U seismologists are analyzing decades of seismic data in the hope of discerning the significance of earthquake swarms in a geologically complex region known as a geothermal hotspot and for recent—geologically speaking—volcanism.
Researchers at a field site in Victoria, Australia are among the first to use fiber optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) for high-precision tracking of induced seismicity from a small carbon dioxide (CO2) injection, according to a new study published in Seismological Research Letters.
A Southwest Research Institute-led team has modeled the early impact history of Venus to explain how Earth’s sister planet has maintained a youthful surface despite lacking plate tectonics.
A large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape — perhaps covered by trees and roaming wooly mammoths — in the recent geologic past (about 416,000 years ago), according to a new study in the journal Science. The results shed light on the stability of the Greenland ice sheet over the last two and a half million years. Instead, moderate warming (mean global temperatures of 1 to 1.5°C above pre-industrial values) that lasted 30, 000 years, from 420,000 to 390,000 years ago, led to significant melting (at least 20% of the total Greenland Ice sheet volume).
A new study from Tel Aviv University and Tel-Hai College solves an old mystery: Where did early humans in the Hula Valley get flint to make the prehistoric tools known as handaxes?
No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms. The result defies a 70-year-old assumption about what caused an explosion of oceanic fauna hundreds of millions of years ago.
Researchers have gained important insights about mysterious structures 1,800 miles below the Earth’s surface—and how they may be connected to volcanoes.
Scientists at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) have developed a radar technique that lets them image hidden features within the upper few feet of ice sheets. The researchers behind the technique said that it can be used to investigate melting glaciers on Earth as well as detect potentially habitable environments on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
A new study featuring data from the NASA Mars Perseverance rover reports on an instrumental detection potentially consistent with organic molecules on the Martian surface, hinting toward past habitability of the Red Planet.
Beneath the water’s surface lays a hidden world: one that cannot be perceived by the human eye. When viewed through a special camera, however, rich polarization patterns are unveiled. These patterns can be used as an alternative approach to geolocation- the process of determining the geographic position of an object.
An international research team involving scientists from the University of Vienna, the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and Univeristy of Edinburgh has described the process of growing three-dimensional manganese dendrites.
What would a traveler from the future think if one day s/he could analyze the rocks that are currently forming on the planet? Surely, this person would find quite a few plastic fragments and wonder why this material was so abundant in rocks of a certain age on Earth.
A study from Caltech shows that the early Earth accreted from hot and dry materials, indicating that our planet's water—the crucial component for the evolution of life—must have arrived late in the history of Earth's formation.
University of Queensland researchers have optimised a new technique to help forecast how volcanoes will behave, which could save lives and property around the world.
A team of astrophysicists at the University of Toronto (U of T) has revealed how the slow and steady lengthening of Earth’s day caused by the tidal pull of the moon was halted for over a billion years.
How Earth’s inner core formed, grew and evolved over time remains a mystery, one that a team of University of Utah-led researchers is seeking to plumb with the help of seismic waves from naturally occurring earthquakes.