Geology

Over the past century, 70 percent of beaches on the islands of Kaua'i, O'ahu, and Maui have had long-term erosion, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of Hawai'i (UH) report…

The "plumbing systems" that lie under volcanoes,  the location and behavior of magma chambers on the Earth's mid-ocean ridge system, a vast chain of volcanoes along which the Earth forms new…

A chemical analysis of lunar soil collected by Apollo astronauts forty years disputes the belief that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years…

ESA’s GOCE gravity satellite has provided us with the first high-resolution map of the boundary between Earth’s crust and mantle – the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho. Earth’s crust, as you know,…

One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes.  That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan.  It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday…

My friend has written a paper on Pantelleria (which I am a co-author of), and I thought it was a good opportunity to discuss some of the techniques we can use to reconstruct a volcano's magma chamber…

The deadliest mass extinction that we know of, 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period,  took a long time to kill most of Earth's life, and it killed in stages. It wasn't superior…

A new study in Nature shows that Santorini may have reactivated roughly a century before the Minoan "super-eruption", a lot quicker than had previously been thought.  How is it possible to time…

I think most people - certainly myself - get that grim "what, another one?" feeling when you first hear news that there has been a big earthquake. But is it justified? In other words, have we…

Welcome to the world's slowest clock. The 'argon-argon clock' works by measuring the ratio of the amount of radioactive potassium in a sample of rock to the amount of its decay product, argon. As…