Scientists studying an 82-gram meteorite discovered in the mountains of southern Algeria in 1990 have found fossils of primordial snowflakes. Not that they’re actual snowflakes. Rather, these fossils are tiny pores left behind billions of years ago, when snowflake-like ice grains that once filled them […]
A theoretical study explores why small earthquake sources can produce quasiperiodic sequences of identical events, whereas earthquakes on large faults are intrinsically more variable. Many natural and human-made phenomena obey power law distributions. In one of the most well known examples, a power law distribution describes how small […]
Mars once had salt lakes that are similar to those on Earth and has gone through wet and dry periods, according to an international team of scientists that includes a Texas A&M University College of Geosciences researcher. Marion Nachon, a postdoctoral research associate in the […]
The Grand Canyon is not the longest, widest, or deepest canyon on Earth, but as the only canyon among the seven natural wonders of the world, it’s arguably the planet’s grandest canyon. So what makes it so grand? And how long do geologists expect it to retain […]
In 1619, German astronomer Johannes Kepler published his Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World), a text that investigated how mathematics could help the planets of the solar system create celestial music based on their orbital resonances. Three hundred years later, an astronomer using discoveries from NASA’s Kepler mission […]
Astronomers have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet that orbits within the habitable zone of its star. “This is the only planet we know of outside the solar system that [has] the correct temperature to support water, has an atmosphere, and […]
/> If we look past Saturn’s rings, we see that the planet’s surface has few distinctive features. Most of the planet is made of hydrogen, helium, and such trace elements as ammonia, methane, and water, which create the planet’s visible bands and clouds. Occasionally, […]
/> A storm surge is a mound of water produced when a hurricane moves across a large body of water. Driving wind “pushes” the water so quickly that it “piles up” on the water in front of it, producing a mound of water that […]
