Lithium is essential for batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy from solar and wind farms. A new U.S. source could provide 10 times more lithium than the country uses today.
Quirks of our geology made Australia unusually abundant in coal. But as the world goes green, we can switch to vital clean mineral resources so coalminers aren’t left behind.
Tsunamis aren’t just bigger-than-average waves. Triggered by undersea earthquakes or volcanic eruptions like the one in Tonga, they are fast, massive and potentially destructive. Here’s why.
Mountains can’t be created without lubricant, and 2 billion years ago that lubricant was graphite produced by the carbon broken down from layers of dead plankton on the ocean floor.
Perseverance and its helicopter sidekick, Ingenuity, have been on Mars for nearly nine months. The duo have taken rock samples, performed first flights and taken images of the delta in Jezero Crater.
A previously unknown filtering process inside some volcanoes can cause magma to shoot out like champagne from a bottle - and perhaps even make it easier to forecast when a volcano is about to erupt.
From the tallest cliff in the solar system to its largest impact basin, geological processes on other worlds are very similar to those on our own planet.
Greenland’s conditions were once similar to those of a greenhouse. Volcanoes swelled the land, constricted seaways and gigatonnes of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere.
Indigenous artists have been engraving rock shelters for millennia - long before the Kimberley’s celebrated rock art paintings. Now the rocks’ natural coatings are yielding clues to the engravings’ creation.