Geology

Curiosity Rover: Water For Future Mars Astronauts?

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sampled a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route during its first few months on Mars. And what it has found tells a complex story about the gradual desiccation of the Red Planet. Perhaps mo ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 26 2013 - 5:30pm

Traces Of Immense Prehistoric Arctic Ice Sheets During The Pleistocene

Geologists and geophysicists have discovered traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia, confirming for the first time that within the past 800,000 years in the course of ice ages, ice sheets more t ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 30 2013 - 6:12pm

It's No Longer Just Dirt, Soil Takes On a Whole Different Meaning

I can remember a time when I thought of dirt as something that only seemed to change about it was the color. I had noticed it when my family took vacations and even in looking at the soils in my grandparent’s yard since grandmom was an avid composter. But ...

Blog Post - Janice Person - Oct 1 2013 - 11:59pm

Apocalypse 28 Million BC: Earliest Evidence Of A Comet Striking Earth

The earliest evidence of a comet entering Earth's atmosphere and exploding has been found. It rained down a shock wave of fire which obliterated every life form in its path, has been found.  ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 8 2013 - 11:02am

Iceland's Basalt Pillars- No Kaboom Needed

Rocky basalt pillars that litter Iceland's Skaelingar valley likely formed in a surprising reaction where lava met water- but without any explosion occurring. The authors of a new paper say that non-explosive lava–water interactions happened during t ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 10 2013 - 7:00am

Yellowstone: Zircon Crystals Point To 'Recycled' Super-Volcanic Magma Chambers

Tiny crystals of zircon, a mineral found in the igneous rock rhyolites, from the Snake River Plain in the Yellowstone hotspot has solidified evidence for a new way of looking at the life cycle of super-volcanic eruptions. The pattern emerging from new and ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 13 2013 - 9:02am

Volcano Birth- It's Complicated

When most people think of the Antarctic, they think of snow, ice and glaciers- but the continent and surrounding waters are littered with fiery volcanoes. The Marie Byrd Seamounts in the Amundsen Sea are not active, like many volcanoes there are. Their su ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2013 - 9:21am

Separating Fact From Myth About Fracking And Health

Hydraulic fracturing- fracking- is in the headlines a lot these days, and like all issues where science and policy mix, political opinion often outweighs facts.  Natural gas due to fracking has driven CO2 emissions from US energy back to early 1990s level ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 28 2013 - 6:00am

Fracking Won't Make The US A Net Oil Exporter

A group including a consultant, a sustainability advocate and an environmental scientist argued today at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver that while the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling for "tight oil" is an ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 28 2013 - 3:57pm

Pangaea Formation Linked To Permian Mass Extinction

Supercontinents have formed and broken apart throughout the geological history of Earth (see Rodinia) and about 300 million years ago, the Pangaea supercontinent was cobbled together. While we generally attribute some instances of animal and plants existe ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2013 - 10:08am