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.
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.
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.
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.
Greenland’s conditions were once similar to those of a greenhouse. Volcanoes swelled the land, constricted seaways and gigatonnes of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere.
Indigenous artists have been engraving rock shelters for millennia - long before the Kimberley’s celebrated rock art paintings. Now the rocks’ natural coatings are yielding clues to the engravings’ creation.
Without a magnetic field, the Moon’s surface is exposed to solar wind. These could have been depositing resources like water and potential rocket fuel on the Moon’s surface for billions of years.
Earth scientists are on the skilled occupation list for immigration even as universities cut back in this area. The problem lies with a funding model that offers no incentive to lift graduate numbers.
When borders reopen, take an Aussie road trip and explore the continent’s unique geology, from meteorites in the Nullarbor Plain to rock formations that are billions of years old.