A maar is a volcanic crater, often filled with water. New research highlights the similarities between oral stories around the world that shed light on the formation of these craters.
New geological research reveals information about the Earth’s orbit and climate from billions of years ago.
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Even in this fantasy world, geological processes like tectonic plate movement, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions would have built the mountains, carved the rivers, and created vast oceans.
Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago.
Dietmar Muller
Giant forces slowly move continents across a viscous layer of the Earth, like biscuits gliding over a warm toffee ocean. This stresses the continents, and twists and contorts the crust.
Pedestrians in Tokyo pass a television screen broadcasting a report on May 4, 2019 that North Korea has fired several unidentified short-range projectiles into the sea off its eastern coast.
AP Photo/Koji Sasahara
North Korea is a major military threat to the US and its Asian allies, but exactly how powerful are its nuclear weapons? An earth scientist explains why it’s hard to answer this question.
The research vessel must dodge dangerous icebergs as it drills for sediment core samples.
Phil Christie/IODP
A paleooceanographer describes her ninth sea expedition, this time retrieving cylindrical ‘cores’ of the sediment and rock that’s as much as two miles down at the ocean floor.
Waves can be generated in lakes and other bodies of water when seismic energy travels through land.
Leo Roomets / Unsplash
In 2004 an underwater avalanche destroyed an oil platform off Louisiana, causing a 14-year spill. An expert on oil and gas seeps in the Gulf of Mexico warns that this could happen in other places.
A Landsat view of Mount St. Helens in 2011.
U.S. Geological Survey
Molluscs that have shells - like pipis, clams and oysters - have to build their own shell from scratch. And they keep building it their whole life, using chemicals from the sea and their own bodies.
The submersible Alvin about 8,500 feet down, studying seafloor volcanoes and eruptions.
(c) Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with thanks to Daniel Fornari – WHOI-MISO Facility (www.whoi.edu/miso) and National Science Foundation
When you study volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges, doing fieldwork means becoming an aquanaut – diving thousands of feet to the ocean floor in the submersible Alvin, trading tight quarters for amazing views.
Players of Red Dead Redemption 2 use a detailed topographic map to navigate the landscape.
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Red Dead Redemption 2 has been criticised for its portrayals of violence, but it could also be teaching players the lost art of reading a map.
Mountains keep growing and growing and growing for many millions of years until they are so heavy that they can no longer grow taller, only wider.
Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash
When I was little, geologists worked out Earth’s surface was made of pieces, like a giant puzzle. Those pieces, called “tectonic plates”, move and bump into each other and mountains form.
The Earth’s core is cooling down, and one day it will be completely solid – when that happens, Earth might look a lot like Mars.
The green blob is metal-rich molten sulfide in an ore from the Norilsk area in Siberia, the most valuable accumulation of metals of any kind on the planet.
Steve Barnes
Setting the scene for ancient Silk Road trading and now China’s Belt and Road initiative, the Tianshan has changed humanity. Geological evidence shows us how this incredible mountain range formed.