Tag Archives: geology

Let me just cut straight to the bedrock: Will it Blow? Become a Volcano Detective at Mount St. Helens, is freaking awesome. There will be volcanologists in a couple decades who trace their origins to this book. You may even be the one who gives them the book that inspires …

It’s not uncommon to find round, deep red garnet crystals embedded like pomegranate seeds in metamorphic rocks. It’s easy to see why garnets took their name from the Latin word for “seed-like.” When we think garnet, most of us think of those dark scarlet stones. But they can be any …

The environmentally damaging melting of polar ice is also exposing minerals, archaeological wonders and even ice volcanoes and there’s a race to get to them By Frank Swain THE top of the world is melting. Since 1979, when satellites began recording the extent of Arctic sea ice, the ice cap’s …

This rock was brought back from the moon – but part of it could be from Earth NASA By Leah Crane When the Apollo 14 astronauts brought moon rocks back to Earth, they may have also brought back a little piece of home. A bit of granite found on the …

By Leah Crane Hacking NASA’s Curiosity rover let it measure Martian gravity, even though it has no scientific instruments designed to do so. The measurements revealed a surprise at Gale crater. We can use gravity to probe the interior structure of a planet because the gravitational pull of a particular …

Asteroid strikes are bad news for lifeMARK GARLICK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty By Leah Crane Earth and the moon are two peas in a pod, at least when it comes to being pummelled by space rocks. A new analysis has found that impacts causing relatively large craters happen equally as …

An explosive beginningNASA/JPL-Caltech By Leah Crane The cosmic collision that gave Earth its moon may have also given it the ingredients for life. Researchers have never been able to nail down exactly how and when Earth got its carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur, but a new study suggests they may have come …

Hello, and welcome to GeoBits, wherein I give a formal name to the occasional roundups of tasty geoscience news we do here. This inaugural edition has some truly incredible and inspiring stuff. We begin with a seismic mystery on November 11th that had some scientists joking about sea monsters. …

On the morning of September 15, 2007, station I08BO—an infrasound monitoring post for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty near La Paz, Bolivia—picked up a series of atmospheric vibrations. It was an explosion at very high altitude, and there was something streaking across the sky, heading southwest at 27,000 mph. A …

We kill 60 billion chickens a year. Their bones get preserved in landfillJohn Kuczala/Getty By Sam Wong When humans have vanished from the planet, one of the most enduring marks of our impact on Earth will be the sudden appearance in the fossil record of copious chicken bones. Geologists have …