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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The remote Pilbara region of Western Australian formed many billions of years ago when the Earth was much hotter and the crust softer than it is today.
The InSight Lander mission to Mars is preparing for launch in May 2018. But there are seven (or eight) other planets to explore: why have we such a hang up on Mars?
Research suggests a new threat to life on Earth from the meteorite’s crash: Via seismic waves, the impact triggered massive undersea eruptions, as big as any ever seen in our planet’s history.