Geology

Arctic Seafloor Methane Releases Are Double Previous Estimates

Methane has 30 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide but lacks the press awareness of its greenhouse gas cousin.  And a new study in Nature Geoscience has found that the seafloor off the coast of Northern Siberia is releasing more than twice the amou ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 25 2013 - 6:45pm

Two New Lakes Discovered Beneath Greenland Ice Sheet

Two subglacial lakes, each roughly 8-10 km2,  have been discovered 800 meters below the Greenland Ice Sheet. At one point they may have been up to three times larger than their current size.  Subglacial lakes are likely to influence the flow of the ice sh ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 28 2013 - 8:00am

Arizona, And A Living Desert Underground

JHidden underneath hilly grasslands studded with ocotillos and mesquite trees in southeastern Arizona lies a world shrouded in perpetual darkness- Kartchner Caverns, a limestone cave system known for its untouched cave formations, sculpted over millennia ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 2 2013 - 5:41pm

Radiocarbon Calibration Curve Will Allow More Accurate Dating Of Major Past Events

A new, internationally agreed radiocarbon calibration curve method will allow key past events to be dated more accurately. The work led by Professors Paul Blackwell and Caitlin Buck from the University of Sheffield's School of Mathematics and Statist ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2013 - 12:23pm

What We Learned From The Strongest Deep Earthquake Ever Detected

On May 24th of 2013, a magnitude 8.3 earthquake hit deep beneath the Sea of Okhotsk, between Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan. The main shock of the earthquake was located at 610 kilometers (379 miles) depth, a rupture in the mantle far below t ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2013 - 11:30pm

How Water Dissolves Stone, Molecule By Molecule

Experimental techniques and computer simulations have determined a new way of predicting how water dissolves crystalline structures like those found in natural stone and cement.  In a new study, the team shows that their method is more efficient at predic ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 6 2013 - 2:55pm

Those Supervolcanoes In Utah- Wait, What?

The Promised Land means different things to different people. To geologists, the site of some of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth's history might fit the bill, and that means Utah is a pretty good place to be. 30 million years ago, more than 5 ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 11 2013 - 10:36am

Trouble With Terraforming Mars

Most science fiction and news stories describe Mars terraforming as a long term but simple process. You warm up the planet first, with greenhouse gases, giant mirrors, impacting comets or some such. You land humans on the surface right away and they intro ...

Article - Robert Walker - Sep 24 2015 - 6:34pm

4 Billion-Year-Old Diamonds In Earth's Oldest Zircons Turn Out To Be Laboratory Contamination

The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old but no rocks exist that are older than about 3.8 billion years. However, zircons that were eroded from the sedimentary rock section in the Jack Hills of western Australia, which more than 3 billion years old, were ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 19 2013 - 5:26pm

Archean Eon And The Drip, Drip, Drip Of Earth's Crust Into The Mantle

4 billion ago, during the Archean eon, Earth's mantle temperatures were significantly higher than they are today, according to recent numerical model calculations. A new paper from researchers at at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz says the Archean ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 29 2013 - 10:53pm