Geology

Once a month, someone walks into a private tunnel bored under the summit ridge of the Zugspitze, sprays salt water onto a line of steel electrodes fixed in the limestone, and sends an electric…

Picture the trail of islands and drowned peaks that runs northwest from Hawaii: the Hawaiian–Emperor chain, a conveyor belt of crust dragged over a fixed plume of hot rock rising from deep in the…

A survey of the northern Gulf of Mexico has found that 70 bottom simulating reflections (the seismic echo geologists use to trace how deep methane hydrate reaches beneath the seafloor) do not…

A rock came off the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2008. Cataloged as DOM 08006, for the Dominion Range where it was collected, it is one of the most primitive meteorites ever recovered, a lump that…

A seismometer reports one number for one patch of ground. The house a kilometer down the road has no seismometer of its own, so whatever shook it has to be inferred from the instrument that does…

The chimneys at Lost City are the wrong color. Where the black smokers strung along the mid-ocean ridges build dark spires out of metal sulfide, this field on a bald dome of mantle rock in the…

Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute have engineered a marine bacterium to make the mineral olivine dissolve faster, and measured carbon dioxide being pulled out of the air in a pilot-scale tank…

A tractor spreads crushed basalt across a field, and a number appears in a ledger: so much carbon dioxide, removed. The chemistry behind that number is textbook. Rain and soil acid attack the rock,…

Zhang Qianggong was chairing a regional cryosphere meeting in Chengdu on the morning of 26 August when messages began going around a work chat group. His first thought was that it looked like an…

Groundwater extraction is driving land in northern China down by 15.1 millimeters a year, against a natural geological baseline of between -0.5 and 0.5 millimeters a year, according to a sea-level…

The mantle beneath the southern highlands of Mars still preserves a thermal anomaly of 200 to 400 °C. The study, published Aug. 26 in Nature, inferred this internal temperature from radio tracking of…

A study published Aug. 23 in AGU Advances by a team from MIT and the University of Arizona proposes that waves inside the buried ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus carve the four parallel fissures that…