Stand on a quiet Pacific shoreline at night and the ocean sounds calm, almost sleepy. Yet miles offshore, the seafloor is flexing, faults are creeping, and hot water is breathing through volcanic vents as if the planet itself were alive. The Pacific basin hides the world’s most potent tectonic engine, a restless ring where plates ...
Every so often, Earth’s magnetic field wobbles, falters, and – on rare occasions – flips. We don’t feel it in our bones, but rocks, sediments, and even ancient microbes quietly record the drama. In the last decade, scientists have learned to read those records at astonishingly fine scales, uncovering episodes of chaos that standard measurements ...
Yellowstone National Park is famous for its geysers, bison, and breathtaking landscapes but scientists now believe it could hold the key to solving a modern resource crisis. Hidden beneath the park’s bubbling hot springs and volcanic activity may lie vast reserves of helium, an element critical for everything from MRI machines to quantum computing. What ...
Five times, Earth’s living world nearly blinked out – and each time, the rocks kept score. In cliffs, quarries, and microscope slides, paleontologists read the scars of lost oceans, smothered forests, and skies turned strange. The mystery is no longer whether these collapses happened, but how we decoded them, and what those clues say about ...
Under the skyscrapers and crowded streets of America’s biggest cities lies a hidden crisis. New satellite studies show that big cities from New York to Houston are subsiding at a catastrophic rate, threatening thousands of buildings and essential infrastructure. Guilty parties? Over-extraction of groundwater, the force of heavy urbanization, and even prehistoric shifts in the ...
New research confirms that the huge amounts of water stored behind dams have not only changed sea levels but also the planet’s axis of rotation. This shocking discovery shows how much humans have affected the Earth’s geophysical processes. A study in Geophysical Research Letters says that building dams over the past 200 years has caused ...
Geologists have been studying rocks, fossils, and ice cores for hundreds of years to learn about Earth’s past climate. A new study has reconstructed 540 million years of sea level changes with an accuracy that has never been seen before. This study shows patterns that could change how we think about climate change. This research, ...
The Wandan mud volcano in southern Taiwan recently erupted in a dramatic display of bubbling earth and man-made fire. It was a show that combined the raw power of nature with the cleverness of people. For almost 11 hours, four vents spewed mud up to 6.6 feet (2 meters) high. People lit the methane gas ...
An ancient geological force has been quietly shaping the planet for millions of years deep beneath Oman’s rough terrain. Scientists have found a “ghost” plume, a column of hot rock rising from the Earth’s core. This plume may have been very important in changing the direction of the Indian tectonic plate when it crashed into ...
Hells Canyon, a winding cut through the American West, has kept its origins a geological mystery for hundreds of years. Scientists have been trying to figure out how this 1.5-mile-deep (2.4 km) chasm, carved by the Snake River, came to be for a long time. It runs through Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. How could the ...
