As continents grind across ‘hotspots’ in Earth’s mantle, we can get volcanoes erupting on the surface. Studying these can reveal much about our planet’s evolution.
Kimberlite volcanic rock with mantle crystals (green olivine and purple and orange garnet) and fragments of country rock (light grey).
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.
Fool’s gold, or pyrite, is made of worthless iron disulfide, but can contain tiny amounts of the real thing. Using an ‘atom probe’, research has uncovered a new way gold atoms can hide in pyrite crystals.
The ruins of the Temple of Victory in Himera, which was constructed to commemorate the first battle in 480 B.C.
Katherine Reinberger
Are the descriptions of war passed down by ancient historians accurate? A site in Sicily provided a rare chance to fact-check stories told about two battles from more than 2,400 years ago.
Dust can be instructive. The analysis of those collected around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko provided new information on the history of the solar system.
Search for glass beads to reveal the past.
rickmach
Meteorite impacts can be very destructive. One that fell in Mexico around 66m years ago created a 180km crater and caused the extinction of dinosaurs while spewing debris and molten rock into the air…
As of today, the world might have changed forever. A fundamental assumption underpinning much of modern geochemistry is that the earth has the same composition as a class of meteorites called chondrites…