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This is the geological map of Mars. That we have a geological map of another planet, as accurate as it may be, is simply amazing to me. More info after the scroll. Mars doesn’t have any tectonic plates, but that doesn’t stop it from having a very interesting geology. Most of our current knowledge about […]
Ammonite fossils are among the most common in the world, with their characteristic shape and chambered shell. But did you ever wonder what the deal is with those chambers? Ammonites are a group of cephalopod animals that lived as swimmers in the shallow parts of the ancient oceans. They were extremely successful, emerging in the early […]
We judge our planet's biological past by using geological evidence - fossils. Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past.
Fungi were thought to have a minimal impact on minerals' bioweathering. A recent study suggests that fungi are a lot more aggressive than meets the eye. These use acid to access precious nutrients like iron and burrow deep into rocks using mechanical force to further their reach.
About 55.8 million years, the rate of carbon emissions grew abruptly, leading to a period of massive warming. But today's rate of emissions is ten times higher.
New concerns are being voiced in Japan after it was discovered that a significant geological fault line passes right under a nuclear plant - and the fault is active.
How did South America slot next to Africa? Where was my country a billion years ago?
Around 65.5 million years ago a 10-km wide asteroid crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, suddenly altering all life on the planet.
Mars was never the same after a monster volcano erupted on the Red Planet some 3.5 billion years ago. Before the massive eruption, its poles were in completely different locations, so where it rivers and ice sheets. Moreover, the crust buckled and twisted in alien ways, like the skin and flesh of a peach shifting in relation to its pit.
Indonesian authorities lifted a tsunami warning issued after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the island of Sumatra – the largest earthquake since the 2004 disaster. “There is no info on casualties or damages yet,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman at the national disaster mitigation agency, said via text message. “The tsunami warning is based […]
Before life exploded in the Cambrian 542 million years ago, Earth's inhabitants were generally single-celled simple organisms.
As NASA’s New Horizons shuttle zoomed past Pluto, it snapped awesome photos not only of the “ex-planet”, but also of its moons. Now researchers are analyzing those pictures and reporting surprising finds – such as an ancient ocean on Charon, Pluto’s moon. Too big for its skin? The side of Pluto’s largest moon viewed by […]
We’ve seen unfortunate insects trapped in amber time and time again, but this time it’s something else. This time, a new species of ancient flower was found preserved in amber. The fossil species are a representative of the asterids, one of the most diverse groups that also include sunflower, coffee, potatoes and mint. Amber is […]
There are over 5,000 mineral species identified by scientists thus far, but fewer than 100 make up the entire planet's crust. The rest are so rare, short lived and notoriously difficult to replicate that you'd barely know they're here. Not understating the importance of such minerals -- which could offer clues on how the planet formed, but also lead to new industrial applications -- researchers from the United States cataloged the 2,500 rarest minerals on the planet.
They may have had huge mouths, but they fed on plankton - an international team of researchers has found evidence of two new plankton-eating fossil fish species.
A period of significant cooling from 536 to 660 AD brought forth massive societal changes in Europe and Asia, a new study found. The cooling, caused by volcanic activity, coincided with a massive plague, the decline of the Byzantine Empire and the spread of Slavic and Arabic people. It is well known that volcanic activity can […]
Some 50 million years ago, the world was in dire straits. Atmospheric CO2 levels were at over 1000 ppm, with some putting the level at 3500 ppm. Turtles and palm trees were thriving at the poles and sea levels were much higher than they were now as there was virtually no snow to be seen. […]
It's a song of ice and fire - scientists have just witnessed the eruption of the Big Ben volcano in the sub-Antarctic area.
Belemnites are an extinct order of cephalopods ("cephalo" meaning head and "pod" meaning leg) that lived during the Mesozoic era, some 200 to 65 million years ago. They were elongated organisms, resembling today's squids, only tinier and cuter.
The age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years - plus or minus 1% (0.05 billion years). But how do we know this?
Before WWII, there weren't that many plastics around. Today, we use so much that we could literally plaster the planet in one giant clingfilm. A paper published in the journal Anthropocene reviews the state of plastic production, use and pollution and concludes that no place on Earth has been spared.
British researchers have just made a stunning discovery - the biggest canyon may not be in the US or China but under Antarctic ice.
North Korea recently announced that it tested a massive H-bomb, one that's "capable of wiping out the entire United States".
Volcanoes are some of the most amazing geological features but quite often, they’re misunderstood or not understood at all. Here we’ll get to know them a bit better, starting with the basic facts and the moving onto cool and surprising facts, and of course, continuing with everyone’s favorite (from a distance): eruptions. Basic Volcano Facts 1. Volcanoes are […]
A new unfortunate world record has been triggered by fracking
Scientists working at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have released the first ever digital geologic map of Alaska.
It's official - humanity has changed the Earth so much that we've basically created a new geological era, one that scientists call the Anthropocene.
Sinkholes can be dangerous. Here's what you need to know.
Gemologists working in Colombo, Sri Lanka, have confirmed the finding of the largest sapphire in the world.
Chinese researchers say their lunar rover found a new type of lunar rock unlike anything the Americans or Soviets had brought home before.
The annus horribilis continued at the jade mines in Myanmar, as another major landslide was announced, with at least one fatality and ten people missing.
This summer in Poland, two treasure hunters discovered what they believe was a WWII Nazi train filled with treasure, in a buried tunnel. Poland’s Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski said authorities were led to the spot and that he was 99% convinced that the treasure had been located. But according to scientists Krakow’s AGH University of Science […]
Somewhere in the Arctic, in the interior of the Greenland ice sheets, there lies a glacier like no other. This glacier quakes once every minute, more frequently than ever observed. Geologists now believe that studying these ice quakes could help them better understand how ice melts and reacts to rising temperatures and better model ice flow. […]
Scientists finally crack down a puzzle that has eluded the community for years. It seems sea level rise does indeed slow down Earth's spin.
Despite it being studied for many decades, there are still many things we don’t understand about the Stonehenge. Scientists have now identified the original quarries where the bluestones were mined: 225 km away in Wales, and 500 years before the Stonehenge was built! This could indicate that perhaps a proto-version of the Neolithic monument could […]
I’m happy to say that one of the most absurd events in modern science has finally concluded, and with a normal result. The Italian seismologists tried with manslaughter for not carrying a good enough risk analysis have been cleared – most of them, at least. The L’Aquila earthquake struck in central Italy on 6 April […]
If you've been following the news lately (especially science news), the odds are you may have come across images of this California road, deformed to the point where some sections of it are basically vertical.
It basically looks like a weapon: the fossil of a worm-like animal from the Cambrian period has been presented by scientists, and it’s as armored as it gets. The Cambrian was definitely one of the strangest geological and biological stages in Earth’s history; it’s not only that it was 500 million years ago, but the […]
NASA released a stunningly colorful new image of the dwarf planet Pluto, the latest in a series of images that steadily trickle down from the New Horizons probe since it left the solar system this July. And it's not only eye candy either; the features this picture reveals has left the smart guys at the agency scratching their heads.
A team of researchers has analyzed a swarm of data and created the first map that tries to estimate how much water is located beneath the Earth.
Geological maps can be awesome here on Earth, but when we have geological maps of extraterrestrial bodies... that's when we get really excited.
It was a finding that sent ripples throughout the entire paleontology community. Met with heavy criticism, the authors are now vindicated.
Researchers have found new fauna in northern Brazil, in what used to be the continent of Gondwana.
Seismic tremors around Mount St. Helens hint at a new possible eruption in the area. Geological surveys have revealed the interior structure of the volcanic system, and geologists have been able to correlate seismic activity with the activation of the system
The fossils were discovered in the Parnaiba Basin of north-eastern Brazil, and are some 278 million years old, corresponding to the Permian period, when all the continents we know today were still fused together.
Havana lawyer, Dr Fidel Castro, in Washington DC, 1959. (Wikipedia) Besides sunshine and sugar cane, what has Cuba got? It looks like the USA is serious about letting Americans party along Havana’s beaches and carry home a cigar or two. For two generations, two of the continent’s closest neighbours have been estranged with nary a […]
50 years ago, on October 28, 1965, an unlikely British geophysicist made a map that set the record straight on how the world’s tectonic plates fit together.
A sinkhole popped up in St. Albans, England, and engineers fear this is not an isolated event.
Paleontologists have unearthed two spectacular cave lion cubs, preserved by the permafrost in the Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia. The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period within the Quaternary glaciation occurring from 100,000 to 12,000 years ago. At the end of this ice age, several species couldn’t […]
A 7.5 earthquake has struck near the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan and Tajikistan.
