Geology

During the last Ice Age, the ice dammed enormous lakes in Russia. The drainage system was reversed several times and the rivers flowed southwards. A group of geologists is now investigating what took…

Throughout Earth's history, 90,000 out of every 100,000 years have been ice ages - and it's been 12,000 years since the last one. You can thank global warming, it seems. Future ice ages may be…

Volcanoes sometimes get a bad rap for belching CO2 but today it turns out they're also responsible for the air we breathe. National Science Foundation-funded research published this week in the…

The earth sciences rely on highly accurate timing to unravel past causes and effects, and understand the forces driving many events from ice ages to mass extinctions. Other scientific disciplines,…

Pressures and temperatures at the Earth’s core are stupendous – more than 3.5 Mbar and 7000K – and currently it is impossible to recreate these conditions in the laboratory. Our information about…

Permafrost, the perpetually frozen foundation of the north, serves like a platform underneath vast expanses of northern forests and wetlands that are rooted in many northern ecosystems. But rising…

The DNA of ancient microorganisms, long frozen in glaciers, may return to life as the glaciers melt, according to a paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…

A new substance analyzer has been developed by the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics and Automation in Moscow. Its functionality is to automatically determine the…

If you've never heard of Lake Agassiz, it's no surprise. It disappeared over 8,000 years ago. Yet it may have been the global warming trigger that ended the last Ice Age. Using remains from lakes,…

Volcanologist Sarah Fagents from the University of Hawaii at Manoa had an amazing opportunity to study volcanic hazards first hand, when a volcanic mudflow broke through the banks of a volcanic lake…