Oxygen first accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago, during the Great Oxidation Event.
A long-standing puzzle has been that geologic clues suggest early bacteria were photosynthesizing and pumping out oxygen hundreds…
Category: Earth
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Weaker and stronger lithospheric regions cause the rotation of the Victoria microplate
The East African Rift System (EARS) is a newly forming plate tectonic boundary at which the African continent is being separated into several plates.
This is not a clean break. The system includes several rift arms and one or more smaller…
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Discovery of Ancient Super-Eruptions Indicates the Yellowstone Hotspot May Be Waning
Throughout Earth’s long history, volcanic super-eruptions have been some of the most extreme events ever to affect our planet’s rugged surface.
Surprisingly, even though these explosions eject enormous volumes of material—at least 1,000…
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New clues to deep earthquake mystery
A new understanding of our planet’s deepest earthquakes could help unravel one of the most mysterious geophysical processes on Earth.
Deep earthquakes — those at least 300 kilometers below the surface — don’t typically cause damage, but…
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Yale finds a (much) earlier birth date for tectonic plates
Yale geophysicists reported that Earth’s ever-shifting, an underground network of tectonic plates was firmly in place more than 4 billion years ago — at least a billion years earlier than scientists generally thought.
Tectonic plates are large…
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The asteroid that killed the Dinosaurs stuck earth at ‘deadliest possible’ angle
Simulations to recreate the extinction-level event that killed 75% of life on Earth 66 million years ago, has shown the angle the asteroid struck was at 60 degrees.
At this angle it maximised the amount of climate-changing gases thrust into the…
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Using Drones to Monitor Explosive Volcanoes
Due to the difficult accessibility and the high risk of collapse or explosion, the imaging of active volcanoes has so far been a great challenge in volcanology.
Researchers around Edgar Zorn from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in…
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The lower mantle can be oxidized in the presence of water
If we took a journey from Earth’s surface to the center, the midway point locates roughly at 1900 km depth in the lower mantle.
The lower mantle ranges from 660 to 2900 km depth and occupies 55% of our planet by volume. The chemical composition…
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The story of Earth’s evolution is being deciphered
Around 1800 miles beneath the Earth’s surfaces is a magmatic region between the solid silicate-based mantle and molten iron-rich core: The core-mantle boundary.
It’s a remnant of olden times, the primordial days about 4.5 billion years ago…
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Mars – The planet where mud erupts and flows
Mars today has no active volcanoes, much of the heat stored inside the planet has been lost over millions of years creating a thick outer crust preventing molten rock reaching the surface.
A study today of the planet’s surface shows possible…
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