Geology

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…

Loess sediments and their soils cover around one-tenth of the earth. In Europe, loess is a powdery product of glaciations during the Ice Age. During those cold periods, this very fine, light material…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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;…

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…

In 1911 the discovery that the earth was billions of years old changed our view of the world forever. At the end of the 19th century, many geologists still believed the age of the Earth to be a few…