Category Archives: Geology

We know about Einstein’s paper on Special Relativity, and we know about his paper on General Relativity. Many of us even know about his paper about chemistry and Brownian Motion. What’s less well know is his brief stop over in … Continue reading →

Russian drilling operations at Lake Vostok, Antarctica, have succeeded in collecting a long-sought core sample of water frozen into the borehole from the glacier-covered, 20 million-year-old lake they cracked into last year. “The first core of transparent lake ice, two meters long, … Continue reading →

And here’s proof: A couple of Dinosaurs in the Grand Canyon! – Deskarati An analysis of mineral grains from the bottom of the western Grand Canyon indicates it was largely carved out by about 70 million years ago—a time when dinosaurs were … Continue reading →

Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a giant volcanic caldera, or an earthen cap that covers a huge reservoir of superhot liquid rock and poison gasses. Large parts of the park were formed in previous supervolcano eruptions, the most … Continue reading →

The rise of the first complex life depended on vital metals brought up to the Earth’s surface from far below in vast granite deposits, a new study argues. Metals like copper, zinc and molybdenum are essential ingredients for certain enzymes … Continue reading →

Biologically speaking, it isn’t that hard to create very simple, one-celled organisms. But the leap to multicellular life requires many factors to line up just perfectly. Now a new hypothesis suggests we wouldn’t even be here without some well-timed erosion. … Continue reading →

The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully shed light on processes up to 3 billion years ago, the theory isn’t sufficient in explaining … Continue reading →

When volcanoes erupt, they create a stunning visual spectacle for anyone watching, but they also emit impressive noises that range from low rumbles to concussive blasts. Some of the sounds are below the range of human hearing, and a new … Continue reading →

The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today. Then something happened. Over several tens of millions of years – a … Continue reading →

The magnitude 8.6 earthquake that struck North Sumatra, Indonesia, at 2:38 p.m. local time yesterday did not lead to a tsunami comparable to Indonesia’s 2004 disaster for a couple of reasons. The magnitude 9.1 earthquake that struck in 2004 and triggered … Continue reading →

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about … Continue reading →

Two of the solar system’s best natural timekeepers have been caught misbehaving, suggesting that the accepted ages for the oldest known rock samples are off by a million years or more. According to two new studies, a radioactive version of … Continue reading →