Although researchers have determined the ages of rocks from other planetary bodies, the actual experiments—like analyzing meteorites and moon rocks—have always been done on Earth. Now, for the first time, researchers have successfully determined the age of a Martian rock—with experiments performed on Mars. The work, led by geochemist Ken Farley of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), could not only help in understanding the geologic history of Mars but also aid in the search for evidence of ancient life on the planet.
Earth
Boulder, Colo., USA - In the latest issue of The Geological Society of America journal Lithosphere: Learn more about the Great Slave Lake shear zone in northwest Canada (open access article); the tectonic development of the Tibetan Plateau; and two flysch belts. Also in this issue: an open-access review article on crustal melting, ductile flow, and deformation in mountain belts.
A team of international researchers, led by Monash University's Associate Professor Wouter Schellart, have developed a new global map of subduction zones, illustrating which ones are predicted to be capable of generating giant earthquakes and which ones are not.
The new research, published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, comes nine years after the giant earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra in December 2004, which devastated the region and many other areas surrounding the Indian Ocean, and killed more than 200,000 people.
Istanbul, Turkey – 12 December 2013: The first test to identify acute mountain sickness has been developed by a team of researchers in Italy and France and is presented today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2013. The test could revolutionise trekking and climbing by predicting who will develop the potentially deadly condition so they can avoid high altitudes, ascend more gradually or take preventative medication.
NASA scientists have revealed the inner workings of the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica and found that declining chlorine in the stratosphere has not yet caused a recovery of the ozone hole.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Increasing temperatures and changes in the timing of snowmelt runoff could impact the amount of water available on the upper Rio Grande in the future. These are some of the results of the Upper Rio Grande Impact Assessment released by Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Anne Castle.
Biochemical sleuthing by an Indiana University graduate student has ended a nearly 50-year-old search to find a megamolecule in bacterial cell walls commonly used as a target for antibiotics, but whose presence had never been identified in the bacterium responsible for the most commonly reported sexually transmitted disease in the United States.
SAN FRANCISCO—Less than 20 miles from the site where melting ice exposed the 5,000-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman, scientists have discovered new and compelling evidence that the Italian Alps are warming at an unprecedented rate.
Part of that evidence comes in the form of a single dried-out leaf from a larch tree that grew thousands of years ago.
SAN FRANCISCO—From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes—and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.
That's about 40 percent more than previously thought, according to a new analysis of these Arctic storms.
A 40 percent difference in the number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees latitude—the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.
Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 11, 2103 -- Figuring that if some is good, more must be better, researchers have been trying to pack more graphene, a supermaterial, into structural composites. Collaborative research led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers discovered that, in this case, less is more.
In a paper appearing in Nature's Scientific Reports, Dr. Ramesh Mani, professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University, reports that, in the presence of a magnetic field, negative resistivity can produce a positive resistance, along with a sign reversal in the Hall effect, in GaAs/AlGaAs semiconductor devices.
The risk posed by tsunami waves generated by Canary Island landslides may need to be re-evaluated, according to researchers at the National Oceanography Centre. Their findings suggest that these landslides result in smaller tsunami waves than previously thought by some authors, because of the processes involved.
Brigham Young University geologists found evidence of some of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth's history right in their own backyard.
These supervolcanoes aren't active today, but 30 million years ago more than 5,500 cubic kilometers of magma erupted during a one-week period near a place called Wah Wah Springs. By comparison, this eruption was about 5,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.
Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geology articles posted online ahead of print on 6 Dec. cover fossil estuarine fauna from the Austrian Miocene; a "natural wind tunnel" experiment on the Chinese Loess Plateau; frictional melting of a microgabbro in water; glacial moraines in Colorado; new topographic data from Venus; solving a major issue concerning melt extraction from Earth's mantle; and experimentally generated volcanic lightning.
Stanford scientists may have solved the mystery of what drives a type of earthquake that occurs deep within the Earth and accounts for one in four quakes worldwide.
Known as intermediate-depth earthquakes, these temblors originate farther down inside the Earth than shallow earthquakes, which take place in the uppermost layer of the Earth's surface, called the crust. The kinds of quakes that afflict California and most other places in the world are shallow earthquakes.