Early in his career, Paul Olsen sat in front of a television, expecting to see his own image. He had hosted a television crew on a research expedition to Manicouagan Crater in Canada, where he and his team were investigating the Triassic–Jurassic boundary in the geological record. Olsen, a palaeontologist at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of [...]
The magma that rises from the mantle, forming new islands, may blast more than it bubbles. Where those plumes of magma originate — at the core-mantle boundary or the mantle-crust boundary — and how fast they rise to the surface are still open questions among volcanologists. But now a new study of minerals from the [...]
Northern Europe may have gotten stormier since the late Victorian Era. Looking at a fresh analysis of old atmospheric pressure data, researchers found that the annual number of windy days may have risen by one to five days per century in parts of northern Europe, and the intensity of such storms may have grown too. [...]
The ricochet of a rock fall resonates in the mind of anyone who has heard it. But it also sets off subterranean waves detectable by far-off seismic stations — and now researchers are using those signals to remotely model rockslides. Franziska Dammeier, an engineering geologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and [...]
A pair of mineral clues recently found in a fossil seafloor may be signs that ancient bacteria helped create banded iron formations — Precambrian-aged sedimentary rocks known for their vibrant, reddish- brown-colored thin layers — that researchers use to reconstruct ancient interactions between the atmosphere, the ocean and the seafloor. For a long time, “there’s [...]
On the battlefields of the Somme, history and geology meld. Beneath the chalky earth, men carved messages, memorials and poems into the walls of tunnels that were dug almost a century ago during the First World War. Explosions in the tunnels buried countless men and reshaped the surface, where grass and trees now soften the [...]
Glaciologists and climatologists are racing to correct an error in the latest edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which they say overstates the extent of ice loss in Greenland over the past 12 years. The 13th edition of the atlas was released on 15 September. The map’s publisher, London-based HarperCollins, said in [...]
It’s early June in the Austrian Alps. Tourists in shorts sweat their way up a trail from the cable car above Lake Hallstatt. But the summer heat doesn’t stop a group of scientists from pulling on brightly colored jumpsuits over their hiking clothes at the entrance to Mammuthohle, one of the many limestone caves that [...]
The cold water beneath the winter pack ice in Baffin Bay is getting warmer, according to measurements taken by thermometer-wearing narwhals. The data collected from the diving mammals fill in a geographical and seasonal gap in the region’s climate records, as no winter temperatures were previously available from the area. The data also confirm that [...]
This past spring’s eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was a nightmare for travelers, but it gave scientists in Europe unprecedented access to a complex eruption right in their backyard.