The United States Geological Survey has a vast collection of satellite images capturing breathtaking geological features of our planet. As a geologist, I’ve picked eight of the most fascinating.
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 area’s iconic national parks are home to grizzlies, elk and mountain snowfall that feeds some of the country’s most important rivers. A new report show the changes underway as temperatures rise.
Scientists studied charcoal layers in the sediment of lake beds across the Rockies to track fires over time. They found increasing fire activity as the climate warmed.
Everest didn’t become the highest mountain overnight. This process was excruciatingly slow; a result of complex interactions between the solid earth, the atmosphere and the biosphere.
We think of mountains as remote and little affected by human activity. Unfortunately, the negative impacts of what we do has important implications for nature, wildlife and human society.
Pikas – small cousins of rabbits – live mainly in the mountainous US west. They’ve been called a climate change poster species, but they’re more adaptable than many people think.
Olivier Dangles, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)
The parable of the dragons underlines the need to apprehend glacier disappearance in a transdisciplinary way, to create a dialogue between the physical, ecological and philosophical sciences.
Early humans called Denisovans lived in a remote mountain cave between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, and possibly longer still, raising intriguing questions about their relationship to modern humans.
Directeur de recherche CNRS, Expert for Conservation Biology, Axa Chair for Functional Mountain Ecology at the École Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)