A meteorite hitting Earth at many kilometres per second puts ‘ground zero’ target rocks under immense pressure. A shock wave faster than the speed of sound can result – and new materials created.
The ocean floor holds unique information about Earth’s history. Scientific ocean drilling, which started 50 years ago, has yielded insights into climate change, geohazards and the key conditions for life.
Cumberland Island National Seashore off the coast of Georgia.
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How do the narrow ribbons of sand that line the Atlantic and Gulf coasts withstand the force of hurricanes? The answer lies in their shape-shifting abilities.
India’s Mawmluh Cave, home of the reference stalagmite for the newly named age.
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2018 brought the announcement of a new geologic age that covers the last 4,200 years. How do scientists divide up Earth’s timeline and what do these demarcations mean?
Storage site for wastewater from hydraulic fracturing operations just outside Reno, Texas.
AP Photo/LM Otero
New research shows that injecting wastewater deep underground can cause earthquakes far from the injection site. It also raises questions about which rock layers are the safest injection targets.
Luckily, monitoring systems at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano allowed some warning before fissures opened up in 2018.
United States Geological Survey/AAP
Melbourne lies at the eastern end of a volcanic province, but when’s it going to blow? Understanding the geology of Melbourne and comparing it to Hawaii is really helpful in calculating risk.
Feeling blue? An Oppenheimer Blue diamond of 14.62 carats.
EPA/AAP
Some diamonds come from depths of more than 650km. Tiny imperfections in these gems give us clues about what’s happening in Earth’s hidden geological layers.
Successive governments have seen the Great Barrier Reef not just as a scientific wonder, but as a channel to further economic development.
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The $444 million awarded to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation has been criticised as a politically calculated move. But governments have been asking what the reef can do for them ever since colonial times.
Zirconia is a mineral with a crystal structure made from the elements zirconium and oxygen. It looks pretty like diamond, but is only worth a fraction of the value.
Sapphires and rubies are both crystals of the mineral corundum - but with different impurities to create blue and red hues. Australian sapphires are renowned for being inky blue.
Many scientists believe it is impossible to ignore the human impact on the planet when defining the geological age we live in today.
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A new array of seismometers provides a glimpse of what’s happening deep beneath this geologic fault. New data help explain why the north and south of the region are more seismically active than the middle.
What makes a stone a gem? It boils down to a few key qualities: beauty and durability. But opal, the national gemstone of Australia, is an anomaly - it’s soft.
Some explosive volcanoes can send ash high up into the sky and it can travel around the world over different countries.
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When magma rises towards the surface gas bubbles start to form. Whether or not they can escape as the magma is rising affects how explosive the eruption will be.
It’s been 50 years since the find of burnt bones in ancient soil, eroded from deep in shoreline dune in NSW.
Jim Bowler
It’s been half a century since Jim Bowler discovered Mungo Lady, which changed the course of Australian history. But now he says the find has fallen off the national radar, leaving a legacy of shame.
Where all the water in the ocean came from is a very good question. Scientists have been wondering about it for a long time.
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The Big Bang created a cloud of dust and rocks that included a lot of rocks that were made of ice, like giant snowballs. That’s where some of the water came from.
Scientists have long thought most nitrogen in Earth’s ecosystems comes from the air, but new research shows it also is released as rocks weather. This could boost plant growth and help sequester carbon – but not fast enough to avert climate change, as some pundits have claimed.