Geology

'Skylights' In The Ceilings Of Martian Caves

A heat-sensitive camera flying on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has led a team of Mars geologists to find seven small, deep holes on the flanks of Arsia Mons, a giant volcano on Mars. The holes may be openings, called skylights, in the ceilings of under ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 24 2007 - 3:24pm

Not So Far Out: Did An Asteroid Kill The Woolly Mammoths?

What killed the wooly mammoths? Overhunting, climate change and disease lead the list of probable causes but a once-ridiculed theory is now being supported by an international team of scientists; namely that a comet or meteorite exploded over the planet ro ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 25 2007 - 1:30am

Majorite: Oxygen Reservoir In The Earth's Mantle

If our planet did not have the ability to store oxygen in the deep reaches of its mantle there would probably be no life on its surface, according to scientists at the University of Bonn who have subjected the mineral majorite to close laboratory examinati ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 26 2007 - 3:04pm

Ocean Drilling Could Hold Key To Understanding Earthquakes

One of the most ambitious earth science expeditions yet mounted to gain a better understanding of the earthquake process, has begun off the coast of Japan, involving geologists from the universities of Southampton and Leicester. Dr Lisa McNeill, of the Uni ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 24 2011 - 3:29pm

India's Truncated Lithospheric Roots Only Half As Thick

50 million years ago the Indian sub-continent collided with the enormous Eurasian continent with a velocity of about 20 cm/year. With such a high velocity India was the fastest of the former parts of Gondwanaland, according to a report by a team of scienti ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2007 - 5:05pm

Earth's Interior Due To Chemical Diversity, Not Just Convection

Seismologists in recent years have recast their understanding of the inner workings of Earth from a relatively benign homogeneous environment to one that is highly dynamic and chemically diverse. This new view of Earth’s inner workings depicts the planet a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 27 2007 - 6:19am

Yellowstone Supervolcano Rising

Yellowstone is North America’s largest volcanic field, produced by a “hotspot” – a gigantic plume of hot and molten rock – that begins at least 400 miles beneath Earth’s surface and rises to 30 miles underground, where it widens to about 300 miles across. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 8 2007 - 7:05pm

Largest Mudslide Discovered Equal To Distance From London To Rome

An enormous submarine landslide that disintegrated 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet documented on Earth. The massive submarine flow travelled 1,500 kilometres – the distance from London to Rome – before depositing its load. De ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 21 2007 - 11:34pm

Rising Tides Intensify Non-Volcanic Tremor In Earth's Crust

For more than a decade geoscientists have detected what amount to ultra-slow-motion earthquakes under Western Washington and British Columbia on a regular basis, about every 14 months. Such episodic tremor-and-slip events typically last two to three weeks ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 24 2011 - 3:39pm

Whither Limestone? New Clues About The Mars Climate Enigma

Planetary scientists have puzzled for years over an apparent contradiction on Mars. Abundant evidence points to an early warm, wet climate on the red planet, but there’s no sign of the widespread carbonate rocks, such as limestone, that should have formed ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 22 2007 - 12:16pm