Earth’s oceans feel eternal, yet their origin reads like a cosmic detective story with missing pages and conflicting witnesses. For decades, scientists argued over whether our water was baked out of young Earth’s rocks or delivered by wayward space rubble. New measurements from ancient minerals and meteorites have sharpened the picture, but they haven’t drained ...
First, scientists have found the record of an enormous tsunami that hit Japan when dinosaurs roamed the Earth stored not in rock but in amber. A new research shows that twisted pieces of ancient tree resin, 115 million years old, have the characteristic marks of a deadly oceanic wave. In a study published in Scientific ...
Stand on the flank of an active volcano and almost everything you feel is contradiction: still air above, restless Earth below, silence broken by a low, animal growl from inside the planet. Volcanoes are not just spectacular natural shows; they are pressure valves for a planet that is constantly rearranging itself from the inside ...
Earth looks solid and familiar from where we stand, but its story is one of chaos, collision, and reinvention on a planetary scale. Over billions of years, a series of violent, often invisible geological events have turned a molten rock ball into the only known home for life in the universe. Scientists are still ...
Across Earth’s surface, there are places that feel like they were designed to annoy geologists. The rocks are real, the measurements are solid, the dating is careful – and yet the stories those formations tell do not quite line up with the scripts in our textbooks. In the past few decades, better satellites, sharper ...
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, ...
From deserts that hum like distant engines to lakes that turn animals to stone, our planet is full of landscapes that seem to belong in speculative fiction rather than an atlas. Geologists have mapped mountains and dated rocks with astonishing precision, yet some formations still stubbornly resist neat explanations. These places are more than ...
On a quiet night in Guatemala or Costa Rica, the ground can go from stillness to a violent roar in a matter of seconds, turning streets into chaos and mountainsides into rivers of rock. Central America may look like a narrow tropical bridge between continents, but deep below the rainforests and volcanoes, the region ...
Deep beneath your feet, far below the crust we walk on and the mantle that slowly churns, lies a realm we have never seen and will likely never touch. Yet this hidden world silently shapes the length of our days, steers our magnetic shield, and records the entire history of our planet in slow, ...
Newly discovered 140-million-year-old tracks rewrite the history of African dinosaurs and reveal how earthquakes preserved their footsteps. A Coastal Walk Frozen in Time Along South Africa’s Robberg Peninsula, a geological detective story has unfolded. What were once thought to be earthquake cracks in ancient estuary rocks are now recognized as: “We’re seeing the literal footsteps ...
