geological

Dwarf planet Ceres is shown in these false-color renderings, which highlight differences in surface materials. Images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft were used to create a movie of Ceres rotating, followed by a flyover view of Occator Crater, home of Ceres’ brightest area. Credit: NASA/JPLModeling reveals how Ceres powers unexpected geologic activity.According to Scott King, a geoscientist at the Virginia Tech College of Science, our view of Ceres has been hazy for a very long time. In previous telescopic scans from Earth,…

Four mirabilite mounds along the Great Salt Lake shoreline.Photo: Utah Geological SurveyAngelic Anderson crouched down and ran her fingertips across a large white mound that rose several inches from the surface of the bone-dry lakebed. As a park ranger at the Great Salt Lake State Park in northern Utah, she’s accustomed to seeing the massive lake’s waterline recede, especially during dry months when there’s little to no rainfall. However, over the course of the last few winters, she and other rangers have noticed…

An anaerobic, motile, gram-positive bacterium adheres to the molybdenite (MoS2) surface to uptake the trace elements from the mineral structure for cell synthesis. Credit: Science China Press In a paper published in National Science Review, a team of scientists critically summarize major advances in mineral-microbe interactions, including molecular mechanisms of interactions and macroscopic manifestations of such interactions…

Outcrop of carbonate-altered mantle rock in the San Andreas Fault area. A recent study shows that carbon sequestration in mantle rocks may prevent large earthquakes in parts of the San Andreas Fault. Credit: Frieder Klein / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution The San Andreas Fault in California is renowned for its large and infrequent earthquakes. However, some segments of the San Andreas Fault (SAF) instead are…

Cave explorers have traversed what's now the deepest known cave in Australia.On Saturday, a group of explorers discovered a 401-meter-deep cave, which they named Delta Variant, in Tasmania's Niggly-Growling Swallet cave system within the Junee-Florentine karst area.  Its depth just beat out its predecessor, the Niggly Cave, by about 4 meters.With a descent that lasted 14 hours and took many months to prepare for, Delta Variant is causing a stir among explorer communities.But it holds a different kind of fascination for…

The Anthropocene is the name some scientists are giving to the current geological epoch, marked by the point in time when human activity started having a significant impact on the geology and ecosystems of Earth – not least through climate change.  Now scientists think they have precisely determined the beginning of the Anthropocene through particular biomarkers – radioactive material discovered in marine sediments and corals in the northwest Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan.That material comes from atomic tests…

The European Space Agency's (ESA) BepiColombo mission successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury, capturing 56 intricate images in the process, according to the agency. The joint project developed by the ESA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is tasked with examining the least explored planet in the inner solar system. During its closest approach to Mercury on June 23, the probe was around 200 km above the surface, capturing close-up images of the planet using its three onboard monitoring cameras.“We…

The scars and pockmarks of the aging apartments and housing units under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority don’t immediately communicate the idea of innovation. The largest landlord in the city, housing nearly 1 in 16 New Yorkers, NYCHA has seen its buildings literally crumble after decades of deferred maintenance and poor stewardship. All told, this forsaken subsidized housing is in the midst of what local planners have called “demolition by neglect.” It would require an estimated $40 billion or more, at…

Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes. …

Our planet's protective shell isn't quite what it used to be. Over the past two centuries its magnetic strength has taken a nosedive, and nobody has the foggiest idea why. At the same time, a concerning soft-spot in the field called the South Atlantic Anomaly has blistered over the Atlantic ocean, and has already proven problematic for delicate circuitry on orbital satellites.  Both of these troubling observations fuel concerns that we might be seeing signs of an imminent reconfiguration that would turn the compass…