Category: Earth

For more than 10,000 years, the people who lived on the arid landscape of modern-day western New Mexico were renowned for their complex societies, unique architecture and early economic and political systems.

But surviving in what Spanish…

The existence of a tectonic plate called Resurrection has long been a topic of debate among geologists, with some arguing it was never real.

Others say it subducted – moved sideways and downward – into the earth’s mantle somewhere in the…

Rocks from the Rio Grande continental rift have provided a rare snapshot of active geology deep inside Earth’s crust, revealing new evidence for how continents remain stable over billions of years, according to a team of scientists.

“We tend…

When the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea to connect North and South America millions of years ago, mammals could cross the bridge in both directions.

But the result of this massive migration–a large proportion of mammals with North American…

Tiny crystals, ten thousand times thinner than a human hair, can cause explosive volcanic eruptions.

This surprising connection has recently been discovered by a German-British research team led by Dr. Danilo Di Genova from the Bavarian Research…

When early humans began to travel out of Africa and spread into Eurasia over a hundred thousand years ago, a fertile region around the eastern Mediterranean Sea called the Levant served as a critical gateway between northern Africa and Eurasia.

A…

By creating conditions akin to the center of the Earth inside a laboratory chamber, researchers have improved the estimate of the age of our planet’s solid inner core, putting it at 1 billion to 1.3 billion years old.

The results place the core…

Volcanic eruptions in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest over the last 2.6 million years are more numerous and closely connected to subsurface signatures of currently active magma than commonly thought, according to newly published…

Scientists have tracked a ‘boomerang’ earthquake in the ocean for the first time, providing clues about how they could cause devastation on land.

Earthquakes occur when rocks suddenly break on a fault – a boundary between two blocks or…