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geology

Latest Articles

Colorful opalized shell of a fossil ammonite.
geology

Life Helps Make Almost Half of Earth’s Minerals

By Joanna Thompson
July 1, 2022
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A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth. It could help us identify other worlds with life too.

an illustration of various objects (a chair, a rocket, a cell phone, etc.) as well as biological objects such as a DNA double-helix and microbe, all against a lime green background
The Joy of Why

What Is Life?

By Steven Strogatz
June 15, 2022
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Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Sheref Mansy, a chemist, to learn more.

climate science

Solving the Faint-Sun Paradox

By Jonathan O'Callaghan
January 27, 2022
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We might have a past faint sun to owe for life’s existence. This has consequences for the possibility of life outside Earth.

Lava bubbling out of the top of a volcano.
geophysics

A Burp or a Blast? Seismic Signals Reveal the Volcanic Eruption to Come

By Robin George Andrews
June 1, 2021
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Scientists have begun to decipher the subtle signs that reveal how explosive a volcanic eruption is going to be.

Artistic representation of water radiolysis supporting life below ground.
microbiology

Radioactivity May Fuel Life Deep Underground and Inside Other Worlds

By Jordana Cepelewicz
May 24, 2021
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New work suggests that the radiolytic splitting of water supports giant subsurface ecosystems of life on Earth — and could do it elsewhere, too.

Q&A

The New Historian of the Smash That Made the Himalayas

By Robin George Andrews
April 14, 2021
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About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.

A mosaic of five microscope images of igneous rocks. The rocks are dappled with blue, pink, orange and multicolor inclusions.
geology

Scientists Pin Down When Earth’s Crust Cracked, Then Came to Life

By Howard Lee
March 25, 2021
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New data indicating that Earth’s surface broke up about 3.2 billion years ago helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life.

Graphical model of a cubic earth.
geophysics

Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology

By Joshua Sokol
November 19, 2020
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An exercise in pure mathematics has led to a wide-ranging theory of how the world comes together.

An ice sheet stretching into the distance.
Abstractions blog

How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)

By Howard Lee
July 21, 2020
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Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change.


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