Geoscience News

Radiocarbon Spike 14,350 Years Ago was Caused by Strongest Known Solar Storm, Study Confirms

An artist’s illustration of a solar storm. Image credit: NASA.
May 15, 2025 by News Staff

The Sun rarely produced extreme solar particle events, orders of magnitude stronger than everything directly observed. Their enormous power can greatly distort the production of cosmogenic isotopes, e.g., radiocarbon (14C), in the terrestrial system, leaving clear signatures in natural terrestrial archives including dateable tree rings. Eight such events were known to occur during the past 12,000 years, with the strongest one being that of 775 CE....

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Markowska et al. show recurrent humid intervals in the central Arabian interior over the past 8 million years. Image credit: Paul Breeze.

Saharo-Arabian Desert Was Regularly Lush and Green Over Period of 8 Million Years: Study

Apr 9, 2025 by News Staff

The Saharo-Arabian Desert is one of the largest biogeographical barriers on Earth, impeding dispersals between Africa and Eurasia, including movements...

A diagram showing the evolutionary history from an aquatic organism and adaptive traits of CSP1-3 phylum for each habitat. Image credit: Michigan State University.

Biologists Discover New Phylum of Bacteria in Earth’s Deep Soil

Apr 8, 2025 by News Staff

Deep soil — ranging from below 30 cm (12 inches) to hundreds of meters, depending on soil type and region — is a neglected ecosystem within...

Aerial view of Mono Lake. Image credit: Dick Lyon / CC BY 4.0.

Large Lakes Supplied Essential Element during Origins of Life, Study Suggests

Mar 26, 2025 by News Staff

The origin of life on Earth required a supply of phosphorus for the synthesis of universal biomolecules. Closed lakes may have accumulated high concentrations...

Lightning starts with a positive fast discharge, followed by an even faster and more extensive negative discharge observed in 3D; signal polarizations slant from the discharge propagation direction and rotate between the two opposite fast discharges; these features can only be due to a cosmic-ray shower that preconditioned the discharge path and guided the discharge current direction. Image credit: ELG21.

Cosmic-Ray Showers Play Pivotal Role in Triggering Lightning Flashes

Mar 11, 2025 by News Staff

How lightning is started in thunderstorms is poorly known. With a newly-developed 3D mapping and polarization system, physicists at Los Alamos National...

Shatter cones at the North Pole Dome in the center of the Pilbara region, Australia. Image credit: Curtin University.

3.47-Billion-Year-Old Impact Crater Discovered in Australia

Mar 6, 2025 by News Staff

A team of geologists from Curtin University has discovered unequivocal evidence for a hypervelocity meteorite impact 3.47 billion years ago (Archean Eon)...

Sohail et al. analyzed a high-resolution ocean and sea ice simulation of ocean currents, heat transport and other factors to diagnose the impact of changing temperature, saltiness and wind conditions. Image credit: Sohail et al., doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/adb31c.

Melting Ice Sheets are Slowing World’s Strongest Ocean Current, Study Shows

Mar 4, 2025 by News Staff

More than four times stronger than the Gulf Stream, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the world’s strongest ocean current and plays a disproportionate...

The Sun as seen by Solar Orbiter in extreme ultraviolet light from a distance of roughly 75 million km. The image is a mosaic of 25 individual images taken on March 7, 2022 by the high resolution telescope of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. Taken at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, this image reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius. Image credit: ESA / NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI Team / E. Kraaikamp, ROB.

Solar Heat May Play Role in Seismic Activity on Earth

Mar 4, 2025 by News Staff

Heat from our Sun drives atmospheric temperature changes on Earth, which in turn can affect things like rock properties and underground water movement,...

An artist’s impression of a ‘Snowball Earth.’ Image credit: NASA.

Giant Glaciers Reshaped Earth’s Surface and Paved Way for Complex Life

Feb 26, 2025 by News Staff

By chemically analyzing crystals in ancient rocks, scientists from Curtin University, the University of Portsmouth and St. Francis Xavier University discovered...

Koll et al. report on the discovery of an anomaly in the beryllium-10 concentration profiles of several deep-ocean ferromanganese crusts (stars) from the Central and Northern Pacific during the Late Miocene. The major bottom (blue line) and surface (red line) ocean currents of the thermohaline circulation are indicated. Image credit: Koll et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-55662-4.

Researchers Discover Unusual Accumulation of Cosmogenic Beryllium in Pacific Ocean

Feb 11, 2025 by Natali Anderson

A team of scientists from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, TUD Dresden University of Technology and the Australian National University, has discovered...

The Earth’s inner core was previously considered to be solid. Image credit: USC Graphic / Edward Sotelo.

Surface of Earth’s Inner Core May Be Changing, Scientists Say

Feb 11, 2025 by News Staff

Geoscientists from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cornell...

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s Earth-observing satellite Suomi NPP (named in honor of Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin). This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. Image credit: NASA / NOAA / GSFC / Suomi NPP / VIIRS / Norman Kuring.

New Study Reveals at Atomic Level How Microbes Consume Atmospheric Carbon Monoxide

Jan 29, 2025 by News Staff

Over two billion tons of carbon monoxide are released into the atmosphere globally each year. Diverse bacteria and archaea consume about 250 million tons...

Mount Rainier. Image credit: Walter Siegmund / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Geoscientists Find Large Bodies of Magma beneath Dormant Volcanoes

Jan 28, 2025 by News Staff

Magma reservoirs beneath volcanoes along the Cascade Range arc vary in depth, size and complexity, but upper-crustal magma bodies are widespread, according...

Bronze and silver coins from the 4th century CE found in Lod, central Israel. Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority.

Atmospheric Lead Pollution Caused Widespread Cognitive Decline in Roman-Era Europe, Study Finds

Jan 7, 2025 by News Staff

Researchers have examined three ice core records to identify lead pollution levels in the Arctic between 500 BCE through 600 CE. Lead isotopes allowed...

Outcrop area of CAMP rocks in Pangea showing paleolatitudes at CAMP time (201 million years ago) of key localities with the terrestrial end-Triassic extinction including the Newark Basin (NB) in northeastern North America, the Fundy Basin (FB) of Atlantic Canada, and the Central High Atlas (CHA) Basin of Morocco. Image credit: Kent et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2415486121.

New Research Casts More Light on Mechanisms of End-Triassic Mass Extinction

Oct 29, 2024 by News Staff

The end-Triassic extinction along with the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous events are the most severe mass extinctions in the past 270 million years. The...

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, originating in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, is a defining mode of interannual climate variability with profound impact on global climate and ecosystems. Image credit: Li et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2404758121.

El Nino-Southern Oscillation is At Least 250 Million Years Old, New Study Suggests

Oct 24, 2024 by News Staff

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which is characterized by irregular alternations between anomalously warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) conditions,...

NASA’s high-flying ER-2 airplane carries instrumentation in this artist’s impression of the Airborne Lightning Observatory for Fly’s Eye Geostationary Lightning Mapper Simulator and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (ALOFT) mission to record gamma rays (colored purple for illustration) from thunderclouds. Image credit: NASA / ALOFT team.

Gamma-Ray Emission from Tropical Thunderstorms Takes More Forms Than Previously Thought

Oct 3, 2024 by News Staff

There’s more to thunderclouds than rain and lightning. Along with visible light emissions, thunderclouds can produce intense bursts of gamma rays that...

The center of this infographic shows the sharpest-ever image of the cloud of charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, while the insets show measurements of high-energy ions and electrons detected along the JUICE’s flyby route. Image credit: ESA / NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Josh Diaz.

JUICE Captures Sharpest Ever Image of Earth’s Radiation Belt

Oct 2, 2024 by News Staff

In August 2024, ESA’s JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer (JUICE) made history with a daring Moon-Earth flyby and double gravity assist maneuver. As the spacecraft...

Han et al. found that erosion from a river network about 75 km from Mount Everest is carving away a substantial gorge; the loss of this landmass is causing the mountain to spring upwards by as much as 2 mm a year and has already increased its height by between 15 and 50 m over the past 89,000 years. Image credit: Truthseeker08.

Nearby River is Pushing Up Peak of Mount Everest, Study Suggests

Oct 1, 2024 by News Staff

Mount Everest, also known as Chomolungma in Tibetan or Sagarmāthā in Nepali, is about 15 to 50 m taller than it would otherwise be because of uplift...

A map of the East Pacific Rise region where the discovery of an ancient seafloor was made. Image credit: Jingchuan Wang.

Geoscientists Discover Mysterious Subduction Zone beneath Pacific Ocean

Oct 1, 2024 by News Staff

During the Mesozoic era, between 250 and 120 million years ago, an ancient seafloor sank deep into Earth in the East Pacific Rise, a tectonic plate boundary...

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