Science News

A team of German scientists on Tuesday launched an expedition to the remote British archipelago of Tristan da Cunha, in a bid to uncover secrets linked to the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

Identifying the composition of the earth's core is key to understanding how our planet formed and the current behavior of its interior. While it has been known for many years that iron is the main element in the core, many questions have remained about just how iron behaves under the conditions found deep in the earth. Now, a team led by mineral-physics researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has honed in on those behaviors by conducting extremely high-pressure experiments on the element.

Even if humankind manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends, future generations will have to deal with sea levels 12 to 22 meters (40 to 70 feet) higher than at present, according to research published in the journal Geology.

High resolution imagery provided by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has shown that small valleys in some parts of the moon are slowly forming. This suggests that the moon's crust is expanding is some areas.

Black diamonds, also known as carbonados, are dark, porous, and found only in Brazil and Central Africa. And they don't come from volcanoes — they come from outer space.

An ice core from the Antarctic has given an NSF-funded research team a glimpse into the very distant past. The continuous core sample provides details on how the Earth's climate and atmosphere changed long ago, and gives clues about variations in ice levels. The oldest ice from the bottom of the core may be up to 100,000 years old.

About 2.5 billion years ago, our planet had virtually no oxygen, and lifeforms were primitive. Then, oxygen levels suddenly spiked, the entire landscape of the planet changed, and we were on our way to complex life.

Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian geologic period, there was a mass extinction so severe that it remains the most traumatic known species die-off in Earth's history.

US researchers have demonstrated the potential use of a new way to measure properties of Earth's magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds the planet.

The earth provides early warning signs of impending earthquake say two groups of researchers who have been studying ozone emissions and a colony of toads...

A remarkable new fossil discovery of amoeba-like micro-organisms that lived 570 million years ago could make scientists rethink some widely-accepted theories about how complex life on Earth first evolved from a single-celled universal common...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Robert Ixer and Richard Bevins, British geologists, after nine months of tedious research, have pinpointed the place from which some of the stones that make up Stonehenge were quarried.