21+ hour, 56+ min ago  (988+ words) Giant impacts on Earth's surface can be cataclysmic events with far-reaching consequences. They can excavate massive craters like the Vredefort Crater. There's also growing evidence that impacts powerful enough can create a massive underground hydrothermal system of cracks and chemistry…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago  (462+ words) For years, scientists studying the Greenland ice sheet have been puzzled by unusual swirling patterns hidden deep beneath the surface. Now, researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery. A new study suggests that the ice itself may be slowly…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago  (556+ words) For a long time, people imagined the moon as a quiet, frozen world where nothing much happens anymore. But new research shows that the moon is more active than we once thought. Scientists have created the first global map of…...

2+ week, 22+ hour ago  (382+ words) Volcanoes may look like simple mountains that erupted once and then fell silent, but in reality they are often the surface expression of complex processes happening deep underground. Magma can move, collect, cool, and change over long periods before reaching…...

3+ week, 20+ hour ago  (497+ words) Earth's magnetic field feels steady and dependable, but over geological time it is anything but fixed. The magnetic north and south poles have swapped places many times in the planet's history in events known as geomagnetic reversals. These flips do…...

1+ mon, 5+ day ago  (475+ words) Sometimes big discoveries begin with a moment of surprise. For Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, that moment came during a walk through Morocco's Dad's Valley in the Central High Atlas Mountains....

2+ mon, 3+ day ago  (506+ words) More than a billion years before dinosaurs'and long before plants and animals'Earth looked very different. In what is now northern Ontario, a shallow, salty lake once sat under a warm sun, slowly drying out like today's Death Valley. As the…...

2+ mon, 6+ day ago  (623+ words) Along the coast of South Africa, strange rocky formations quietly grow in places where life seems unlikely to survive. These structures, known as microbialites, look like ordinary rocks, but they are very much alive. Built layer by layer by communities…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago  (608+ words) When a volcano erupts, it looks like the ultimate destroyer. Red-hot lava pours across the land, burning everything in its path and leaving behind what seems like a lifeless wasteland. But new research shows that even this harsh environment doesn't…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago  (693+ words) In astronomy, there is a concept called "degeneracy. It has nothing to do with delinquent people, but instead is used to describe data that could be interpreted multiple ways. In some cases, that interpretation is translated into exciting new possibilities....