The Nov. 12 earthquake wasn’t centered on any known major faults in the Earth’s crust. In its wake, scientists will collect data to add detail to what they know about seismic activity in the area.
You would not recognise Earth if you saw it 500 million years ago - the lands, oceans, climate and life were all very different. Scientists now have a new map of the deep history of Earth.
Australia is always on the move thanks to continental drift which means the mapped coordinates of any place can get out of line with any GPS locating system. So what’s the plan to fix it?
Fifty years on from a groundbreaking paper, geophysicists have progressed from believing continents never moved to thinking that every movement may leave a lasting memory on our planet.
When two major earthquakes occur within days of each other thousands of kilometres apart, it can look like they’re connected. But are they? Here’s what the science says.
The earth around you might seem static but it’s constantly in motion. We need to track this motion in fine detail if we’re to keep our GPS networks up to date.
What happens beneath the surface before a volcano erupts? Can we predict when one will blow? And how can typhoons and melting glaciers contribute to big eruptions?
For seismologists, there’s much to be learned after a major earthquake, as aftershocks help them map out the fault with high precision. More data now can prepare a region for its next big one.
How is it that Earth developed an atmosphere that made the development of life possible? A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience links the origins of Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere to the…
From the 1950s until recently, we thought we had a clear idea of how continents form. Most people will have heard of plate tectonics: moving pieces on the surface of the planet that collide, pull away…
Plate tectonics – the large-scale movement of Earth’s lithosphere or outer layers – started around three billion years ago, but how those movements started was a bit of a mystery – until today. With colleagues…
New evidence is shedding light on the processes that formed Earth’s oldest rock and mineral record – processes that influenced the early evolution of life. Over the past 30 years our knowledge of the earliest…