News
Earth's magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, swapping magnetic north and south in a switch locked into ancient rock, and it happens on no fixed schedule, yet nothing in the record suggests a single flip ever wiped out life.
6+ hour, 28+ min ago (75+ words) ...
Zealandia, the submerged continent geologists confirmed in 2017, is 94 percent underwater and stretches nearly two million square miles beneath the South Pacific, yet its modern name was quietly proposed by geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk in 1995
7+ hour, 26+ min ago (43+ words) In 1995, geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk proposed calling the submerged landmass around New Zealand a single name: Zealandia. Twenty-two years later, a team led by Nick Mortimer formally confirmed it as Earth's eighth continent, 94 percent of it hidden beneath the South Pacific....
A team led by Nick Mortimer at GNS Science in New Zealand spent two decades mapping the basalt and granite floor of the Tasman region before formally naming Zealandia in a 2017 paper, ending more than a century of arguments about whether a submerged landmass could still count as a continent.
8+ hour, 10+ min ago (883+ words) For more than a century, schoolchildren have learned that Earth has seven continents, and for more than a century that count has been wrong. Published May 31, 2026 The claim was not that Mortimer's team had discovered new land. The claim was…...
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old " the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.
6+ day, 14+ hour ago (0+ words) ...
The gold in your ring formed before Earth existed " and the atoms in that small band are older than every ocean, every continent, and every form of life that has ever lived on this planet.
1+ week, 6+ day ago (0+ words) ...
Water ice gets the Artemis headlines, but simulations suggest a decapitated iron-cored asteroid scattered something far more valuable across the lunar south pole billions of years ago
3+ week, 10+ hour ago (0+ words) ...
The reason Ganymede has a magnetic field at all has stumped planetary scientists for decades, and a new study suggests the moon's core may not be done forming yet
3+ week, 11+ hour ago (830+ words) If correct, the model resolves a long-standing puzzle about why a moon " even the largest one " should still be running a magnetic dynamo at all. Ganymede is the largest satellite in the solar system, bigger than Mercury, and the only…...
Astrobotic's Chakram Burn Marks the Moment RDREs Stop Being a Science Project
1+ mon, 3+ day ago (148+ words) ...
The Architecture of a Gutted Pipeline: What a 47% Science Cut Actually Dismantles at NASA
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (1006+ words) The White House proposed a fiscal year 2027 NASA budget of $18. 8 billion, representing a reduction from what Congress approved for the agency just months earlier. The Science Mission Directorate would absorb significant cuts under the proposal. If enacted, it would represent…...
The Moon's Interior Isn't What We Thought: Blue Ghost Data Upends Fifty Years of Thermal Models
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (540+ words) Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander spent time on the lunar surface in early 2025, and the data it sent back may force scientists to redraw one of the oldest maps of the moon's internal structure. That sounds like a technical detail....