LongStanding

By Washington University in St. Louis August 2, 2022Scientists have determined that Earth’s ancient plume mantle (the deep part) had a water concentration that was a factor of 4 to 250 times lower when compared with the water concentration of the upper mantle. The resulting viscosity contrast could have prevented mixing within the mantle, which would help explain certain long-standing mysteries about Earth’s formation and evolution. New Model Shows Earth’s Deep Mantle Was Drier From the StartEarth’s mantle is the thick…

Earth and Venus are similar in size and location but that similarity likely ends there. While Earth has an abundance of water and life, Venus is dry and fiercely inhospitable. Being closer to the Sun makes it much hotter than Earth. Its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which makes the gas appear like liquid near the surface. NASA has planned to explore Venus via two missions in the early 2030s. One of them is VERITAS, which would orbit the planet. And the other, DAVINCI — Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble…

Over the last few years, as we have been able to peer back deeper and deeper into the early Universe, astronomers have been discovering something extremely puzzling.Before the Universe was a billion years old, giant black holes up to over a billion times the mass of the Sun had already somehow formed. Given what we know about black hole formation and growth, the presence and size of these behemoths is extremely challenging to explain. How did they get there, so soon after the Big Bang? And how did they get so danged big?…

At the beginning of the last ice, local mountain glaciers grew and formed large ice sheets, like the one seen here in Greenland, that covered much of today's Canada, Siberia, and Northern Europe. Credit: Annie Spratt/Unsplash A new study led by University of Arizona researchers may have solved two mysteries that have long puzzled paleo-climate experts: Where did the ice sheets that rang in the last ice age more than 100,000…

Scientists have found a new way to tell whether dinosaurs were hot- or cold-blooded.This question has long eluded paleontologists, leading to many heated debates where they even accused each other of acting more like politicians than scientists.  Early dinosaur researchers initially assumed these animals were slow, lumbering, and cold-blooded like the modern reptiles they seemed to resemble – their closest reptilian relatives that exist today being crocodilians.More recently, however, there have been hints that this is…