NASA
New research comparing the geology of southern Africa with the deep seafloor near New Zealand challenges conventional views of how the planet behaved when it was very young.
Lava erupts from a fissure in Iceland on Dec. 19, 2023.
AP Photo/Marco Di Marco
Iceland is known as ‘the land of fire and ice’ for a reason.
The same region of Iceland saw an eruption in July 2023.
Kristinn Magnusson/AFP via Getty Images
Iceland’s volcanic activity is generally tame compared with explosive eruptions along the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. This time, it’s shaking up a town.
Argyle Diamond Mine / AAP
More than 90% of the world’s pink diamonds came from a single mine that closed in 2020. Geologists are only now beginning to understand the forces that create the rare, highly prized gems.
A man works his way through the rubble of buildings in Marrakesh, Morocco, after a magnitude 6.8 earthquake on Sept. 8, 2023.
Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
A deadly earthquake in Afghanistan, following one in Morocco, highlights the risks in the region.
Bjoern Wylezich / Shutterstock
Scientists were not previously certain how the precious stones arrived at the Earth’s surface.
‘Earthrise,’ a photo of the Earth taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, Dec. 4, 1968.
NASA/Bill Anders via Wikipedia
The Earth isn’t permanent, but it was here for four billion years before humans arrived and should be here for several billion more.
Lloyd Homer / GNS Science
We may never know exactly when the next big quake will hit – but we can have a pretty good idea of the odds.
The remains of the village of Besnaya in Syria, February 7, 2023.
Omar Hadj Kaddour/AFP
In a domino effect, earthquakes can cause others to strike: replicas, but also more distant ones.
The slice you see cut out of the Earth reveals its core, depicted here in bright yellow.
fhm/E+ via Getty Images
Starting at the surface, you would have to dig nearly 2,000 miles before reaching the Earth’s core. No one could survive that trip – and the 10,000-degree F heat once there would vaporize you anyway.
Magma fountains through a fissure on Mauna Loa, becoming lava, on Nov. 30, 2022.
K. Mulliken/USGS
A scientist who led one of the first projects to map the Hawaiian Islands’ deep volcanic plumbing explains what’s going on under the surface as Mauna Loa erupts.
An artist’s impression of the Earth around 2.7 billion years ago in the Archean Eon. With green iron-rich seas, an orange methane-rich atmosphere and a surface dominated by oceans, the Archean Earth would have been a very different place.
(Illustration by Andrey Atuchin)
Could tectonic processes in the early Earth have contributed to the rise of oxygen?
Solarseven / Shutterstock
Giant meteorite impacts may have created the land we live on
Brendan Esposito/AAP
Oral histories talk about a major tectonic event 250 years ago, which changed the course of a river flowing through Lae today.
Earth’s interior 80 million years ago with hot structures in yellow to red (darker is shallower) and cold structures in blue (darker is deeper).
Ömer Bodur/Nature
Ancient blobs deep inside the Earth gather together and break apart like continents, according to new research.
200 million years from now Mogadishu and Mumbai will be neighbours along a large mountain range.
Douwe van Hinsbergen
Why we are predicting the mountains of the far future, and what it can tell us about the world today.
Dating of rocks that once formed some of the world’s first beaches suggests the first large continents grew large enough to rise above sea level roughly 3 billion or so years ago.
Stunning mosaic of oxidised copper in the form of azurite (blue) and malachite (green) in a rock.
Dimitri Houtteman
Using geology and AI, a virtual model of how the Earth’s tectonic plates have evolved can help reveal deposits of copper.
New research suggests that Venus’ crust is broken into large blocks – the dark reddish–purple areas – that are surrounded by belts of tectonic structures shown in lighter yellow–red.
Paul K. Byrne/NASA/USGS
Researchers used decades-old radar data and found that some low-lying areas of Venus’ crust are moving and jostling. This evidence is some of the strongest yet of tectonic activity on Venus.
4 billion years ago, the Earth was composed of a series of magma oceans hundreds of kilometres deep.
Larich/Shutterstock
The rocks provide rare evidence of a time when Earth’s surface was a deep sea of incandescent magma.