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Earth’s inner core is not rock but a sphere of solid iron-rich metal, smaller than the Moon yet probably more massive. As the planet gradually loses heat, liquid metal freezes onto its surface, expanding it by roughly a millimetre each year.
3+ hour, 42+ min ago (705+ words) The centre of Earth is easy to imagine wrongly. It is not a cavern, not a furnace of molten rock, and not a smaller version of the mantle pressed into a ball....
An asteroid struck somewhere north of Australia 11 million years ago, scattering molten glass across a 900-kilometre ellipse in South Australia — yet scientists still cannot find the crater it left behind
10+ hour, 11+ min ago (419+ words) The glass is small enough to sit in a museum drawer, but the event it points to was not small. A set of unusual Australian tektites, now called ananguites,...
Large parts of Antarctica were once covered in temperate forest, and fossilised wood, leaves and roots preserved in its rocks reveal a green polar world where dinosaurs roamed beneath months of winter darkness.
13+ hour, 42+ min ago (860+ words) The easiest mistake to make about Antarctica is to treat the ice as if it has always been there. Published July 12, 2026 The easiest mistake to make about Antarctica is to treat the ice as if it has always been there....
Earth's magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, the last reversal was around 780,000 years ago, and the field has been weakening for the past two centuries
2+ day, 10+ hour ago (600+ words) Earth's magnetic field is not fixed. Over the planet's history it has reversed polarity hundreds of times, swapping magnetic north and south. Published July 10, 2026 Earth’s magnetic field is not fixed. Over the planet’s history it has reversed polarity hundreds of…...
We have mapped the surface of Mars, the Moon and Venus in sharper detail than the floor of our own ocean, most of which no human instrument has ever seen up close
3+ day, 23+ hour ago (569+ words) Published July 8, 2026 Here is a claim that sounds like an exaggeration and is not: the best global maps of Mars, the Moon and Venus resolve finer detail than the best global map of the floor of our own ocean. The…...
The Sturtian glaciation, the longest Snowball Earth event, lasted about 57 million years — almost as long as the age of mammals after the dinosaurs vanished — yet new research from Scottish rocks shows that during at least one brief “slushy” interval, seasons, solar cycles and even El Niño-like rhythms were still pulsing through the frozen planet.
5+ day, 14+ hour ago (596+ words) The Sturtian glaciation is difficult to hold in the mind because its scale is so out of proportion to human history. Published July 7, 2026 For that span of deep time, Earth is thought to have been locked in one of its…...
Around 640,000 years ago, the ground beneath Yellowstone blasted out more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock, then collapsed in on itself — carving the 45-by-85-km caldera that visitors still walk across today
1+ week, 5+ day ago (190+ words) ...
For decades the heavy rocks that carve trails across a Death Valley lakebed were never seen moving, until cameras caught them gliding on thin rafts of melting ice pushed by a light wind
2+ week, 6+ day ago (52+ words) On Racetrack Playa, stones heavy enough to need two hands leave grooves in the dried mud as if they walk. A weather station, fifteen GPS-fitted rocks and a set of time-lapse cameras finally recorded the cause, and it was almost…...
Antarctica's Blood Falls runs red because iron-rich brine reddens on contact with the air
3+ week, 4+ day ago (159+ words) A five-story stain of deep red spills from the white snout of an Antarctic glacier. The cause is not algae and not quite rust: it is ancient, salty, iron-loaded water that has no color underground and turns red only when…...
Earth's largest waterfall is hidden underwater in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland, where dense cold water plunges about 3,500 meters down the seafloor, far exceeding any waterfall on land in drop height and volume
4+ week, 1+ day ago (483+ words) The tallest waterfall on Earth sits unseen on the seafloor between Iceland and Greenland, with no spray and no audible roar, and the water that pours over it moves not through air but through more water. Published June 12, 2026 The mechanism…...