The most astonishing thing about Earth’s greatest landscapes is not that they exist, but that they are still changing beneath our feet right now. Mountains are rising, volcanoes are building new land, rivers are carving deeper scars, and even seemingly “frozen” deserts are quietly on the move. For scientists, these places are like open ...
Deep beneath our feet, far below the crust and mantle we learn about in school diagrams, scientists are beginning to suspect that an echo of an ancient ocean still lingers at the edge of Earth’s core. Not an ocean in the way we picture it, with waves and light and life, but a vast, ...
Have you ever stood somewhere and felt like the rules of physics were taking a coffee break? Maybe your compass needle spun in circles like it had lost its mind. Maybe your sense of direction just vanished into thin air. These places exist across our planet, scattered like hidden puzzle pieces that scientists still can’t ...
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 ...
While the Grand Canyon’s 1.7-billion-year-old rock layers and 6-million-year-old chasm have long dominated America’s geological imagination, a far deeper and dramatically younger gorge has been hiding in plain sight. Hells Canyon, slicing 2,400 meters (7,900 feet) into the Idaho-Oregon border, is North America’s deepest river gorge, yet a groundbreaking study reveals it was carved in ...
Scientists noted an odd phenomenon for years: South Africa was gradually rising out of the sea. They first thought of deep geological forces, maybe a plume of molten rock lifting the ground from beneath. New studies, however, point to a rather more unexpected offender: drought. The very ground under South Africa is rebounding like a ...
