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Planetary geologist Meenakshi Wadhwa uses Martian meteorites to trace the history of our solar system.
Simple physical principles can be used to describe how rivers grow everywhere from Florida to Mars.
Water-bearing minerals reveal that Earth’s mantle could hold more water than all its oceans. Researchers now ask: Where did it all come from?
Life needs more than water alone. Recent discoveries suggest that plate tectonics has played a critical role in nourishing life on Earth. The findings carry major consequences for the search for life elsewhere in the universe.
A series of fossil finds suggests that life on Earth started earlier than anyone thought, calling into question a widely held theory of the solar system’s beginnings.
Jason Morgan developed the theory of plate tectonics in 1967 while working among a critical mass of talented geophysicists at Princeton University.
Textbooks say that the moon was formed after a Mars-size mass smashed the young Earth. But new evidence has cast doubt on that story, leaving researchers to dream up new ways to get a giant rock into orbit.
Join David Kaplan on a virtual-reality tour showing how the sun, the Earth and the other planets came to be.
A mission to collect samples from the far side of the moon could answer questions about a barrage of asteroids nearly 4 billion years ago.