Some of the biggest catfish and sea snakes to ever exist lived in what is today the Sahara desert, according to a new paper that contains the first reconstructions of extinct aquatic species from the ancient Trans-Saharan Seaway. The sea was 50 meters deep and once covered […]
Modeling simulations and comparisons with lunar impact studies have revealed that following Earth’s accretion about 4.6 billion years ago, Earth-shattering impacts continued to shape the planet for hundreds of millions of years. Although these events appear to have tapered off over time, Pilbara craton in Australia and Kaapvaal […]
For colorful, graceful sea fans swaying on coral reefs in the waters around Puerto Rico, copper is an emerging threat in an era of warming oceans. In an NSF-funded study published in the journal Ecological Applications, Cornell University scientists report evidence of metal pollution creating danger for soft coral sea […]
How small is the tiniest possible particle of ice? According to new NSF-funded research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the smallest nanodroplet of water in which ice can form is only as big as 90 water molecules — a tenth […]
Fissures caused by melting of the Greenland ice sheet are threatening its stability, and now drone footage has shown the resulting water drainage is occurring more quickly than previously thought. Melting of this ice sheet – the second largest in the world, with three million […]
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 […]