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Piecing together the puzzle of Pannotia

Earth’s landmasses have joined together into supercontinents and then split apart again as many as six times in the planet’s history. 

31 Jul 2018

Lunar isotopes suggest early water on Earth

The moon is a child of catastrophe, born from a massive collision between the young proto-Earth and a Mars-sized object during the formation of the solar system. 

30 Jul 2018

Island-dwelling mammal had small brain, keen senses

A host of fossils has been discovered near the Romanian town of Haţeg, including 15 species of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs — some of them dwarf dinosaurs — and enormous pterosaurs with 12-meter wingspans, prompting the establishment of the Haţeg Country Dinosaurs Geopark in 2005.

26 Jul 2018

Plumbing Masaya's lava lake

In recent years, volcanic activity at Nicaragua’s Masaya Volcano has been relatively benign, with small eruptive episodes occasionally producing a lava lake in a summit crater that has become one of the country’s top tourist attractions.

24 Jul 2018

Cracking the temperature of columnar jointing

When molten rock cools and contracts, it sometimes cracks to form geometrically shaped columns. This process, called columnar jointing, has led to several famous geological structures.

20 Jul 2018

Mountaintops get less lonely for alpine plants

It takes a hardy plant to live on top of a mountain, but new research shows that summits in the Alps are hosting more species of plants than ever before. Long-term botany surveys conducted on 302 European mountaintops over the past 145 years show that the variety of plant species living on the harsh summits has markedly increased over the last 10 years due to climate change.

18 Jul 2018

Mineral clue to finding perfectly preserved fossils?

The exquisitely preserved fossils found in the 500-million-year-old Burgess Shale in Canada are famous for the detailed anatomy they display. They also provide a rare and crucial record of the Cambrian Explosion, when most of the major animal groups first appeared.

17 Jul 2018

Cretaceous volcanic ash seeded U.S. oilfields

Petroleum and natural gas stores are often found amid rocks — particularly ashbeds — deposited during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs roamed Earth and abundant volcanic arcs lined the edges of the continents.

10 Jul 2018

Ice (Re)Cap: July 2018

From Antarctica to the Arctic; from polar caps, permafrost and glaciers to ocean-rafted sea ice; and from burly bears to cold-loving microbes, fascinating science is found in every nook and crevasse of Earth’s cryosphere, and new findings are announced often. 

09 Jul 2018

Diamonds reveal water in deep mantle

Inclusions in diamonds often render them undesirable to consumers, but they can provide researchers with striking insights into Earth’s composition. Recently, scientists probing diamond samples for the presence of carbon dioxide stumbled instead upon inclusions of ice-VII — a type of crystallized water that forms at very high pressures, and has never before been found in nature.

07 Jul 2018

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