Geology

The first rock that scientists analyzed on Mars with a pair of chemical instruments aboard the Curiosity rover turned out to be a doozy – a pyramid-shaped volcanic rock called a "mugearite" that is…

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sampled a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route during its first few months on Mars. And what it has found tells a complex story about…

Deep earthquakes occur where the oceanic lithosphere, driven by tectonics, plunges under continental plates – examples are off the coasts of the western United States, Russia and Japan. Some new…

Chaotic terrains are enigmatic features stretching up to hundreds of kilometres across Mars. The mechanism by which they formed is hypothesis and even speculation in most cases. A recent paper, which…

The cyclic wobble of the Earth on its axis, axial precession, controls the production of  "fixed" nitrogen, a nutrient essential to the health of the ocean, according to a new study. The…

Researchers have uncovered the largest single volcano yet documented on Earth. Tamu Massif covers an area roughly equivalent to the British Isles or the state of New Mexico, making it nearly as big…

Natural rivers are not straight and they are rarely idle; instead, they bend and curve and sometimes appear to wriggle across the surface over time. That rivers can meander is obvious but how and…

Early on a winter morning in 2011, residents of western Norway who lived or worked along the shores of the nation's fjords were startled to see the calm morning waters suddenly begin to rise and fall…

Data collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice, reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile…

The people of Youngstown, Ohio say they never felt an earthquake before two-and-a-half years ago. But between January of 2011 and February of 2012, 109 tremors were recorded and the author of a new…