New modelling shows how tectonic plate movements, carbon-rich deep-sea sediment, and mountain weathering have regulated Earth’s climate.
A panorama stitched together from about 100 individual Curiosity images. The ‘door’ is circled, and is tiny and hard to see at this scale.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
We should not be surprised that some of the innumerable rocks on Mars have weird shapes, because many have been sand-blasted by wind erosion for billions of years.
This aerial view shows the destruction at Umdloti beach north of Durban. Landslides and floods wreaked havoc.
Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images
Sloping ground, water and clay combined to leave devastation in its wake in Durban.
Earth’s interior 80 million years ago with hot structures in yellow to red (darker is shallower) and cold structures in blue (darker is deeper).
Ömer Bodur/Nature
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.
One half of the fossil discovered in Northern England.
Neil Davies
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.
The near future may be similar to the mid-Pliocene warm period a few million years ago.
Daniel Eskridge / shutterstock
Although alternative terms have been suggested, the Anthropocene captures the magnitude of the crisis we face.
Perseverance took a selfie next to its biggest accomplishment yet – the two small drill holes where the rover took samples of Martian rocks.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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.
Artist’s evidence-based depiction of the blast, which had the power of 1,000 Hiroshimas.
Allen West and Jennifer Rice
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.
One of the hand prints discovered in Tibet that is believed to have been made by children.
Matthew Bennett
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.