Geology

Left alone, pure water is remarkably reluctant to freeze. A clean droplet can be chilled to about −38 °C before it turns to ice by itself. Clouds do not wait that long, because the air is full of…

Line up the rocky part of Earth against the Sun, element for element, and most of the list matches. Then you reach the elements that boil off easily, the ones that need somewhere cool and quiet to…

Somewhere off northern Israel, under a few hundred meters of water, the seabed has a step in it roughly 30 meters high. By rights, it should be gone. Sediment carried up from the Nile settles along…

A thunderclap does two things at once. It rolls across the sky, and it pushes down. Part of that acoustic energy hits the ground and keeps going, converting into seismic waves that ripple through the…

Stand anywhere on the Tibetan Plateau and the word that comes to mind is flat: a cold, thin-aired tableland averaging more than 4,500 metres above sea level, earning its nickname as the Roof of the…

Nobody has ever put a thermometer 5,000 kilometers down. The temperature at Earth's center is inferred, not measured, and one of the load-bearing numbers behind that inference is the melting point of…

Every asteroid carries a birth certificate, if you know where to look for it. It is written not in shape or size but in isotopes, the slightly different weights of the same chemical element, mixed in…

Over roughly 34 hours in July 2019, the desert northeast of the town of Ridgecrest, California, tore open twice. A magnitude 6.4 shock struck on the Fourth of July; the next evening a magnitude 7.1…

Somewhere off the coast of Fogo, in the dark under two kilometres of Atlantic water, lies the wreckage of a mountain. Tens of thousands of years ago a whole flank of the volcano let go and slid onto…

When a fissure eruption begins on the Reykjanes Peninsula, it does not announce itself with a single mountain-top vent. The ground simply tears: a bright seam of fire opening across the lava field,…

Mount Etna's eruptive episode of July 30 to Aug. 2 has ended, Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia said in an account published Aug. 3. Personnel from its Osservatorio Etneo carried…

Stand at the edge of a fresh earthquake rupture, and the ground tells you exactly what happened. Cracks fan across the desert floor. The surface is offset, sometimes by metres, along a ragged seam…