News
Roughly five and a half million years ago the Mediterranean dried up almost entirely, and when the Atlantic finally broke back through at Gibraltar it may have refilled the whole basin in only a few years.
2+ hour, 1+ min ago (283+ words) The Mediterranean looks permanent because human history is short. Rome, Alexandria, Athens, Carthage and Istanbul all belong to a sea that seems older...
The oldest known piece of Earth is a crystal barely wider than a hair, found in the hills of Western Australia — it formed about 4.4 billion years ago, within a few hundred million years of the planet itself, and its chemistry hints that liquid water and the beginnings of a habitable world existed far earlier than anyone expected
3+ day, 10+ hour ago (334+ words) ...
Why Earth Could Not Hold On to Its First Continents Until the Asteroids Stopped Falling
2+ week, 2+ day ago (27+ words) An object ten kilometres across slams into a young Earth, and the rock does not just shatter. It vaporises. A shock wave tears outward, decays into heat,...
Our Ancestors Got Bigger in One Late Leap, Not a Slow Climb Toward Modern Humans
2+ week, 5+ day ago (143+ words) Lay 386 fossil bodies out across two and a half million years and the shape they make is not the one you were taught. There is no tidy ramp, no steady...
Africa May Be Splitting Apart Along a Hidden Rift Stretching From Tanzania to Namibia
2+ mon, 5+ hour ago (212+ words) The paper, published this week in Frontiers in Earth Science, presents the first direct geochemical evidence that the Kafue Rift of Zambia is actively connected to the Earth’s mantle, a finding that could reshape our understanding of how Africa is…...
Fifty-Six Million Years Frozen: New Model Rewrites the Story of Snowball Earth
2+ mon, 2+ day ago (28+ words) Fifty-six million years is a long time to be frozen. It is longer than the entire Cenozoic, longer than the reign of the dinosaurs, longer, frankly, than...
Our Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios for a Warming Antarctica
4+ mon, 2+ week ago (663+ words) When Peter Convey first set foot on Signy Island in the South Orkney archipelago in 1989, there was a small rock poking through the surface of the McCloud...
Earth's Strongest Gravity Hole Sits Beneath Antarctica—And Now We Know How It Got There
4+ mon, 3+ week ago (397+ words) Gravity feels solid. Dependable. The kind of thing you can count on wherever you plant your feet on Earth’s surface. Except you can’t, not really. The pull varies depending on where you’re standing, and nowhere is it weaker than over…...
Silent Threat Beneath the Sea: Electromagnetic Mapping Reveals Locked Fault Zones
5+ mon, 3+ week ago (313+ words) This new three-dimensional (3D) model of resistivity beneath the North Anatolian fault will help earth scientists more accurately identify areas at risk of major earthquakes. The challenge is straightforward: you cannot easily place seismometers on a seafloor. Whilst land-based studies have…...
Physicists Shrink an Ocean to the Width of a Hair
8+ mon, 2+ week ago (356+ words) Imagine trying to recreate the Pacific Ocean on something smaller than a grain of rice. That is essentially what physicists at the University of Imagine trying to recreate the Pacific Ocean on something smaller than a grain of rice That…...