Geology

Ask a biologist to sketch the bacteria that swim along magnetic field lines and you will get much the same drawing every time: a cell with a neat row of tiny bar magnets inside it, lined up nose to…

El Niño, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that reshapes weather around the world, may be about to reach a strength never recorded. Only months ago the ocean was in the opposite state: in…

Writing in Science Advances on Sept. 25, a team led by Paul R. Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center dated the Vesuvius eruption that Pliny the Younger witnessed in 79 CE to 1,938 ± 13 years…

A team led by Maria Schönbächler of ETH Zurich reports that iron and titanium isotopes in samples of the asteroid Bennu are indistinguishable from those in samples of the asteroid Ryugu and in a rare…

Every fossil dig is a bet placed on a piece of ground. A team reads the geology, raises the money, spends a season in the sun, and only afterward learns whether that rock had anything left to say.…

Huifeng Zhang and Mathieu Dumberry of the University of Alberta report that the gravitational pull between Earth's solid inner core and the rock above it drives the slow swings in how long a day…

Researchers at ETH Zurich report that a dense, strongly magnetized rock body lies buried beneath the Dewar region on the Moon's far side, and that magnetizing it would have taken a field of at least…

Mohammed Azhar of Tufts University, Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech and colleagues have measured how fast the ground is sinking along the coasts of the United States, and report that 71.5% of…

Stand on Earth in the first few million years after the Moon formed and almost nothing is familiar. The Moon hangs close, far bigger in the sky than it is now. The day ends before five hours are out.…

A patch of ground on the young Earth could have had everything going for it. Warm rock, liquid water, a supply of the right molecules, a few million years of quiet. Then another body tens of…

Tin is what makes bronze bronze, and it is the one ingredient the Shang should not have had. Copper turns up across northern China, and lead is more widespread still, but tin is scarce anywhere north…

NASA says its Perseverance rover found rock formed from cooled magma, not the lakebed sediment mission scientists expected, in a band of ground called the Margin Unit, at the inner rim of Mars'…