Geoscience News

Mar 10, 2020 by News Staff

Torreites sanchezi, an extinct species of rudist clam that lived during the Cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago, grew fast, laying down daily growth rings. In a new study, a team of researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University used lasers to sample minute slices of Torreites sanchezi’s shell and count the growth rings. The rings allowed the scientists to determine the number of days in a year and more accurately...

Mar 3, 2020 by News Staff

The surface of Earth was likely covered by a global ocean 3.24 billion years ago (Archean Eon), according to a new study published in the journal Nature...

Feb 10, 2020 by News Staff

Zealandia — Earth’s seventh continent — experienced dramatic elevation changes between about 50 million and 35 million years ago, according...

Feb 10, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has found bacterial communities within microscopic spheroidal aggregates of dolomite, oil and water found in sheets...

Feb 7, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of planetary scientists and geochemists from the United States and Switzerland has demonstrated that a technique called atom probe...

Jan 30, 2020 by News Staff

Named the auroral dunes, the phenomenon was discovered by citizen scientists in Finland; it occurs at a relatively low altitude of 100 km (62 miles), in...

Jan 27, 2020 by News Staff

A team of researchers from the University of Washington and NASA’s Ames Research Center has analyzed iron-rich micrometeorites collected from 2.7 billion-year-old...

Jan 23, 2020 by News Staff

Groundwater flow from land to sea could have important coastal impacts but it is usually unrecognized. Delicate reefs may be particularly sensitive to...

Dec 30, 2019 by Enrico de Lazaro

A team of Japanese scientists has discovered a 3-million-year-old petit-spot submarine volcano in one of the oldest parts of the Pacific Plate. The newfound...

Dec 27, 2019 by News Staff

Researchers from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey earlier this month released a new version of...

Dec 20, 2019 by News Staff

Tiny iron particles fall from Earth’s molten outer core and pile on top of the planet’s solid inner core, according to new research published in the...

Dec 16, 2019 by News Staff

BedMachine Antarctica is a new bed topography map based on ice thickness data from different research institutes dating back to 1967, encompassing nearly...

Dec 5, 2019 by News Staff

New research suggests that during the Late Cretaceous epoch to the Early Paleogene epoch (80-50 million years ago), much of the southwestern United States...

Nov 27, 2019 by News Staff

When and how the Earth evolved from a molten mass into a rocky planetary body continually resurfaced by plate tectonics remain some of the biggest questions...

Nov 26, 2019 by News Staff

Sedimentological evidence and archaeological data show that huge tsunami hit the coast of today’s Sultanate of Oman around 1000 CE; the tsunami was almost...

Nov 12, 2019 by News Staff

The Nile is a 4,130-mile (6,650 km) long river in northeastern Africa. It has been suggested that the river in its present path is at least 6 million...

Oct 23, 2019 by News Staff

A team of geoscientists from Australia, Canada and the UK has detected primordial chemical signatures preserved within young kimberlites, small-volume...

Aug 2, 2019 by News Staff

Smoke from fires in southern Africa is the largest contributor of phosphorus — an important agricultural fertilizer — to the Amazon rainforest,...

Jul 12, 2019 by The Conversation

Earth’s magnetic field protects and makes our planet habitable by stopping harmful high-energy particles from space, including from the Sun. The source...

Jul 5, 2019 by News Staff

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne science mission has revealed 56 previously uncharted subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland...