Geology

Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active volcano in northern Tanzania, swelled without erupting between March 2022 and August 2023, and a team led by D. Sarah Stamps of Virginia Tech reports that the best…

On Oct. 24, 2025, Robert Wagner was doing something routine: checking the quality of a map of the whole Moon, stitched together from hundreds of frames taken years apart. The software he uses turns…

A team led by researchers at Université Paris-Saclay has dated the iron-rich crusts that cap a plateau in northern Malawi, finding a continuous span of mineral ages running from 397 million years…

NASA says a crater 728 feet across (222 meters) formed on the Moon's eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. It was found only in October 2025, when an image analyst spotted it…

In a computer, the collision that made the Moon has always been a collision between two liquids. It is not that anyone thought the young Earth and the body that struck it were molten all the way…

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have put a long-term number on something geological carbon budgets usually leave out: how much carbon dioxide the world's dry lands pull from the air as…

Mercury's surface carries the record of how much the planet has shrunk as its interior cooled, and part of that record has been buried. G. Nishiyama of the German Aerospace Center's Institute of…

Rivers flowing from all 19 valley glaciers sampled in central Svalbard carried dissolved methane at levels high enough for the gas to escape into the air, peaking at 425 times the amount the water…

Midway up the southeastern flank of Mauna Loa, about where the forest gives out, a gulch called Hiʻonamoa cuts a two-meter face into the mountainside. None of it is lava. It is ash, bed on bed, some…

The Hengduan Mountains run north to south along the eastern edge of Tibet, a corrugation of steep ridges and deep river gorges that packs alpine meadow, conifer forest and subtropical valley within a…

The flash-flood warning the National Weather Service office in Flagstaff sent at 2:42 p.m. on August 29 was not drawn around a county. It was written for "The Bright Angel Creek Basin below the…

Earthquake prediction has a long record of not working. Decades of hunting for a reliable precursor, a swarm of small shocks, a change in groundwater, a shift in the ground's electrical properties,…