Geology News

April 18, 2024

Top Headlines

New Step in Tectonic Squeeze That Turns Seafloor Into Mountains

Apr. 2, 2024 — Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were moving apart. The researchers think that the ...

Harnessing Hydrogen at Life's Origin

Mar. 18, 2024 — A new report uncovers how hydrogen gas, the energy of the future, provided energy in the past, at the origin of life 4 billion years ago. Hydrogen gas is clean fuel. It burns with oxygen in the air to provide energy with no CO2. Hydrogen is a key to ...

New Geological Study: Scandinavia Was Born in Greenland

Mar. 21, 2024 — The oldest Scandinavian bedrock was 'born' in Greenland, according to a new geological study. The study helps us understand the origin of continents and why Earth is the only planet in our solar system with ...

Mars Attracts: How Earth's Interactions With the Red Planet Drive Deep-Sea Circulation

Mar. 12, 2024 — Scientists have used the geological record of the deep sea to discover a connection between the orbits of Earth and Mars, past global warming patterns and the speeding up of deep ocean circulation. ...

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'Tug of War' Tactic Enhances Chemical Separations for Critical Materials

Apr. 3, 2024 — Lanthanide elements are important for clean energy and other applications. To use them, industry must separate mixed lanthanide sources into individual elements using costly, time-consuming, and ...

From the Mediterranean Into the Atlantic: The Gibraltar Arc Is Migrating to the West

Mar. 19, 2024 — Oceans are subject to continuous change, mostly over extremely vast periods of time running into millions of years. Researchers have now used ...

Even Inactive Smokers Are Densely Colonized by Microbial Communities

Mar. 15, 2024 — Everything is everywhere -- under certain conditions microbial communities can grow and thrive, even in places that are seemingly uninhabitable. This is the case at inactive hydrothermal vents on the ...

Surprising Insights About Debris Flows on Mars

Mar. 14, 2024 — The period that liquid water was present on the surface of Mars may have been shorter than previously thought. Channel landforms called gullies, previously thought to be formed exclusively by liquid ...

Sulfur and the Origin of Life

Mar. 13, 2024 — A new study shines a spotlight on sulfur, a chemical element that, while all familiar, has proved surprisingly resistant to scientific efforts in probing its role in the origin of ...

Scientists Propose New Theory That Explains Sand Ripples on Mars and on Earth

Mar. 12, 2024 — Sand ripples are symmetrical. Yet wind -- which causes them -- is very much not. Furthermore, sand ripples can be found on Mars and on Earth. They ...

Rock Weathering and Climate: Low-Relief Mountain Ranges Are Largest Carbon Sinks

Mar. 7, 2024 — For many hundreds of millions of years, the average temperature at the surface of the Earth has varied by not much more than 20 degrees Celsius, ...

New Study Reveals Insight Into Which Animals Are Most Vulnerable to Extinction Due to Climate Change

Mar. 7, 2024 — In a new study, researchers have used the fossil record to better understand what factors make animals more vulnerable to extinction from climate ...

Geologists Explore the Hidden History of Colorado's Spanish Peaks

Mar. 4, 2024 — A team has collected dozens of samples from across southeastern Colorado, and their results could help to answer an enduring mystery: What made Colorado's High Plains so ...

Mercury Rising: Study Sheds New Light on Ancient Volcanoes' Environmental Impact

Feb. 29, 2024 — Massive volcanic events in Earth's history that released large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere frequently correlate with periods of severe ...

80 Mph Speed Record for Glacier Fracture Helps Reveal the Physics of Ice Sheet Collapse

Feb. 28, 2024 — New research documents the fastest-known large-scale breakage along an Antarctic ice shelf. A 6.5-mile crack formed in 2012 over 5-and-a-half minutes, showing that ice shelves can effectively shatter ...

UBC Okanagan Researchers Look to the Past to Improve Construction Sustainability

Feb. 23, 2024 — Researchers are revisiting old building practices -- the use of by-products and cast-offs -- as a way to improve building materials and sustainability of the trade. A technique known as rammed earth ...

Biggest Holocene Volcano Eruption Found by Seabed Survey

Feb. 22, 2024 — A detailed survey of the volcanic underwater deposits around the Kikai caldera in Japan clarified the deposition mechanisms as well as the event's magnitude. As a result, the research team found ...

Early-Stage Subduction Invasion

Feb. 15, 2024 — Our planet's lithosphere is broken into several tectonic plates. Their configuration is ever-shifting, as supercontinents are assembled and broken up, and oceans form, grow, and then start to ...

New 'Time Travel' Study Reveals Future Impact of Climate Change on Coastal Marshes

Feb. 15, 2024 — A new study offers a glimpse into the possible impact of climate change on coastal wetlands 50 years or longer into the future. Scientists are usually forced to rely on computer models to project the ...

Researchers Studying Ocean Transform Faults, Describe a Previously Unknown Part of the Geological Carbon Cycle

Feb. 12, 2024 — This study reports widespread mineral carbonation of mantle rocks in an oceanic transform fueled by magmatic degassing of CO2. The findings describe a previously unknown part of the geological carbon ...

Ice Cores Provide First Documentation of Rapid Antarctic Ice Loss in the Past

Feb. 8, 2024 — Researchers have uncovered the first direct evidence that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet shrunk suddenly and dramatically at the end of the Last Ice Age, around eight thousand years ago. The evidence, ...

Ancient Rocks Improve Understanding of Tectonic Activity Between Earthquakes

Feb. 7, 2024 — Rocks once buried deep in ancient subduction zones -- where tectonic plates collide -- could help scientists make better predictions of how these zones behave during the years between major ...

What Turned Earth Into a Giant Snowball 700 Million Years Ago? Scientists Now Have an Answer

Feb. 7, 2024 — Inspired during field work in South Australia's Flinders Ranges, geoscientists have proposed that all-time low volcanic carbon dioxide emissions triggered a 57-million-year-long global ...

A New Origin Story for Deadly Seattle Fault

Feb. 6, 2024 — The Seattle fault zone is a network of shallow faults slicing through the lowlands of Puget Sound, threatening to create damaging earthquakes for the more than four million people who live there. A ...

Study Challenges the Classical View of the Origin of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and Warns of Its Vulnerability

Feb. 5, 2024 — The Circumpolar Current works as a regulator of the planet's climate. Its origins were thought to have caused the formation of the permanent ice in Antarctica about 34 million years ago. Now, a ...

Source Rocks of the First Real Continents

Jan. 31, 2024 — Geoscientists have uncovered a missing link in the enigmatic story of how the continents developed- - a revised origin story that doesn't require the start of plate tectonics or any external ...

Unexpected Biodiversity on the Ocean Floor

Jan. 25, 2024 — Hydrothermal vents and manganese nodule fields in the deep oceans contain more biodiversity than ...

Records of Cometary Dust Hitting the Asteroid Ryugu

Jan. 23, 2024 — The Hayabusa2 mission that collected samples from the asteroid Ryugu has provided a treasure trove of insights into our solar system. After analyzing samples further, a team of researchers have ...

Planetary Commons: Fostering Global Cooperation to Safeguard Critical Earth System Functions

Jan. 22, 2024 — Tipping elements of the Earth system should be considered global commons, researchers argue. Global commons cannot -- as they currently do -- only include the parts of the planet outside of national ...

Key Factors in Human-Made Earthquakes

Jan. 18, 2024 — Researchers report that the roughness of pre-existing faults and associated stress heterogeneity in geological reservoirs play a key role for causing human-made earthquakes, so-called runaway events. ...

Study Uncovers Potential Origins of Life in Ancient Hot Springs

Jan. 12, 2024 — A research team investigated how the emergence of the first living systems from inert geological materials happened on the Earth, more than 3.5 billion years ago. Scientists found that by mixing ...

Meteorite Analysis Shows Earth's Building Blocks Contained Water

Jan. 9, 2024 — Analysis of iron meteorites from the earliest years of the solar system indicate that the planetary 'seeds' that ultimately formed Earth contained ...

From NYC to DC and Beyond, Cities on the East Coast Are Sinking

Jan. 2, 2024 — Major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, in some cases as much as 5 millimeters per year -- a decline at the ocean's edge that well outpaces global sea level rise, confirms new ...

Mesopotamian Bricks Unveil the Strength of Earth's Ancient Magnetic Field

Dec. 18, 2023 — Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth's magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new ...