Earth Science
press releases.

Earth Science22 Sep 2025

Beneath 300 kilometers: Natural evidence for nickel-rich alloys in the mantle

Diamonds from South Africa’s Voorspoed mine have revealed the first natural evidence of nickel-rich metallic alloys forming deep in Earth’s mantle, between 280–470 km. A new study reveals that these inclusions coexist with nickel-rich carbonates, capturing a rare snapshot of a “redox-freezing” reaction whereby oxidized melts infiltrate reduced mantle rock. The growing diamond trapped both reactants and products of a diamond-forming reaction. This finding not only confirms long-standing predictions about mantle redox conditions but also highlights how such ...

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Earth Science19 Sep 2025

New biochar breakthrough offers hope for cleaner, safer farmland soils

Agricultural soils across the world are increasingly polluted by heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, chromium, and arsenic. These toxic elements, often introduced through industrial wastewater, fertilizers, and manure, can accumulate in crops and threaten human health through the food chain. Long-term exposure is linked to kidney damage, osteoporosis, and even cancer. Protecting soil health and food safety has therefore become an urgent global challenge. In a new study published in Agricultural ...

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Earth Science13 Sep 2025

Scientists trace origins of now extinct plant population from volcanically active Nishinoshima

Tokyo, Japan – Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have determined the genetic lineage of a now extinct plant population from Nishinoshima, a volcanic island whose frequent eruptions periodically “reset” the vegetation. While they traced the lineage to a nearby island, they discovered distinct genetic quirks due to the rarity of seeds making it there, including a “founder’s effect”. Their findings offer a rare glimpse into the very earliest stages of ecosystem development in an isolated environment. Nishinoshima, ...

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Earth Science12 Sep 2025

Cyclic triaxial tests: Evaluation of liquefaction resistance in chemically treated soils

Soil liquefaction can be a major threat to the infrastructure and built environments in an earthquake-prone area. This happens due to substantial loss of soil stiffness and strength due to applied stress. Loose, moderately granulated, sandy soil is more prone to soil liquefaction. Recognizing the urgent need to enhance urban resilience in seismic-prone regions, particularly in rapidly urbanizing areas vulnerable to such hazards, scientists are focusing on different mitigation techniques. Soil compaction technique ...

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Earth Science27 Aug 2025

How Iceland’s fiery mantle plume scattered ancient volcanoes across the North Atlantic

What do the rumblings of Iceland’s volcanoes have in common with the now peaceful volcanic islands off Scotland’s western coast and the spectacular basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? About sixty million years ago, the Icelandic mantle plume—a fountain of hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle boundary—unleashed volcanic activity across a vast area of the North Atlantic, extending from Scotland and Ireland to Greenland. For decades, scientists have puzzled over why this burst of volcanism was so extensive. Now, research led by the University of Cambridge ...

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Earth Science26 Aug 2025

Sneaky swirls: scientists confirm ‘hidden’ vortices could influence how soil and snow move

Researchers have shown for the first time how hidden motions could control how granular materials such as soil and snow slip and slide, confirming a long-suspected hypothesis. The knowledge could help in understanding how landslides and avalanches work and even help the construction industry in the future. Scientists have found sneaky swirls and loops of movement in materials such as soil and snow could influence how materials move. The knowledge could be invaluable in understanding how avalanches and landslides on Earth and Mars speed up or slow ...

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Earth Science26 Aug 2025

Tropical volcanic eruptions push rainfall across the equator

Volcanoes that blast gases high into the atmosphere not only change global temperatures but also influence flooding in unusual ways, Princeton researchers have found. In an August 26 article in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers reported that major eruptions create distinct patterns of flooding depending on the location of the volcano and the dispersal of its plume. The patterns mostly divide along the line of the equator. When a volcano’s plume is generally contained in one hemisphere, flooding decreases in that hemisphere and ...

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Earth Science20 Aug 2025

2022 Pacific volcano eruption made a deep dive into Alaska

Atmospheric waves from a massive 2022 South Pacific volcanic eruption created seismic waves that penetrated Earth to at least 5 kilometers in Alaska, creating an opportunity to employ an unusual method of peering into the state’s deep subsurface. Ken Macpherson, a scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and other researchers analyzed the coupling of atmospheric pressure waves with the ground to determine the speed at which seismic waves travel through Alaska’s upper crust. Subsurface material properties such as hardness, which controls seismic velocity, can ...

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Earth Science20 Aug 2025

Stylolites complicate sound wave propagation in sedimentary rock samples

Stylolites — irregular seams that occur in limestone — have been found to affect how acoustic waves move through rock samples. Laboratory-based insights from KAUST researchers offer an improved understanding of how these features impact acoustic imaging techniques, which are used to analyze induced microseismic events during hydraulic fracturing[1]. Carbonate-based sedimentary rocks like limestone often hold gas and oil reserves within their layers. Researchers commonly use sound (acoustic) waves to interrogate subsurface rocks and identify rock types, reservoir ...

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Earth Science20 Aug 2025

Mysterious fickle hill earthquake in Northern California may have unexpected source

What lies beneath Fickle Hill in northern California? Maybe the answer to an earthquake mystery that has puzzled seismologists for decades. The origin of the 1954 magnitude 6.5 earthquake that rattled residents around Humboldt Bay has been unclear, but a new study now suggests a surprising source: the Cascadia subduction interface. In the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, a team of researchers shares the scientific sleuthing that led them to that conclusion, in a tale that combines fading paper records, modern methods and modeling, and eyewitness accounts of the event. The ...

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Earth Science15 Aug 2025

The 8,000-year history recorded in Great Salt Lake sediments

Over the past 8,000 years, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has been sensitive to changes in climate and water inflow. Now, new sediment isotope data indicate that human activity over the past 200 years has pushed the lake into a biogeochemical state not seen for at least 2,000 years. A University of Utah geoscientist applied isotope analysis to sediments recovered from the lake’s bed to characterize changes to the lake and its surrounding watershed back to the time the lake took its current shape from the vast freshwater Lake Bonneville that once covered much of northern Utah. “Lakes are great integrators. ...

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Earth Science13 Aug 2025

Years after an earthquake, rivers still carry the mountains downstream

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — On May 12, 2008, the magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan Earthquake shook central China, its destructive tremors spreading from the flank of the Longmen Shan, or Dragon's Gate Mountains, along the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau. Over 69,000 people died in the disaster, nearly a third are thought to be from geohazards like the more than 60,000 landslides that rushed down the slopes of the Longmen Shan. After more than a decade and a half of work, scientists finally have an account of the fate of the landslide debris. Surveys of a reservoir downstream of the epicenter revealed how and how quickly the region’s ...

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Earth Science12 Aug 2025

Rice geoscientist honored with Geological Society of America’s Woollard Award

Richard Gordon, the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geophysics, Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University, has been named the 2025 recipient of the George P. Woollard Award from the Geological Society of America (GSA). The award recognizes a career of outstanding contributions to geology through the application of geophysical principles and techniques. Gordon’s work has transformed our understanding of global plate motions and plate boundary deformation. “This is a special honor for me,” Gordon said. “Some of the past recipients have been mentors, close colleagues ...

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Earth Science11 Aug 2025

How organic matter traps water in soil — even in the driest conditions

From lifelong farmers to backyard gardeners, most plant-lovers know that adding organic matter to a field, vegetable plot or flowerpot increases the soil’s moisture. Now, for the first time, Northwestern University scientists have uncovered the molecular mechanisms that enable organic matter to boost soil’s ability to retain water — even in desert-like conditions. Carbohydrates — key components of plants and microbes — act like a molecular glue, using water to form sticky bridges between organic molecules and soil minerals, the team found. These bridges lock in moisture that ...

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Earth Science5 Aug 2025

New insights into tectonic movements in south-eastern Europe

A groundbreaking study has provided new insights into the forces that cause tectonic movements in Europe’s most seismically active regions. Researchers used advanced satellite data to track land movements in Greece, western Turkey and the southern Balkan countries. “This is crucial information for assessing the risk of major earthquakes.” Friction Tectonic plates diverge, converge, or move past each other in opposing directions at speeds of 0.1 to 90 millimetres per year. At many plate boundaries, rocks on both sides of the fault remain stuck for decades or centuries while the plates continue to move. This causes material stress ...

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Earth Science4 Aug 2025

Major discovery of Ice Age bones in a Norwegian cave opens a window into the past

Scientists have uncovered the remains of a vast animal community that lived in the European Arctic 75,000 years ago. The bones of 46 types of animals – including mammals, fish and birds – were discovered in a cave on the coast of Northern Norway, representing the oldest example of an animal community in the European Arctic during this warmer period of the ice age. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research team believe the bones will help scientists understand how wildlife once responded to dramatic climate shifts, insights that ...

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Earth Science4 Aug 2025

Gigantic, meat-eating dinosaurs didn’t all have strong bites

A new analysis of the bite strength of 18 species of carnivorous dinosaurs shows that while the Tyrannasaurus rex skull was optimized for quick, strong bites like a crocodile, other giant, predatory dinosaurs that walked on two legs—including spinosaurs and allosaurs—had much weaker bites and instead specialized in slashing and ripping flesh. Reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4, these findings demonstrate that meat-eating dinosaurs followed different evolutionary paths in terms of skull design and feeding style despite their similarly gigantic sizes. “Carnivorous dinosaurs took very different paths as they ...

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Earth Science22 Jul 2025

Earthquake caught on camera

Kyoto, Japan -- During the midday Friday prayer hours on 28 March 2025, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck central Myanmar along the Sagaing Fault. With an epicenter close to Mandalay, the country's second-largest city, it was the most powerful earthquake to strike Myanmar in more than a century and the second deadliest in its modern history. The cause was a strike-slip fault, in which two masses of earth "slip" past each other horizontally along a vertical fault plane. To an observer, it would look like the ground were split in two along a defined line, with both sides being wrenched past each other ...

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Earth Science18 Jul 2025

First analyses of Myanmar earthquake conclude fault ruptured at supershear velocity

The first studies of the 28 March 2025 magnitude 7.8 Myanmar earthquake suggest that the southern portion of its rupture occurred at supershear velocity, reaching speeds of 5 to 6 kilometers per second. In their paper published in The Seismic Record, seismologists Lingling Ye, Thorne Lay and Hiroo Kanamori share new details about the devastating earthquake, which caused widespread and severe damage in Myanmar and neighboring countries such as Thailand, with more than 5,000 confirmed casualties. The earthquake ruptured about ...

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Earth Science18 Jul 2025

Curved fault slip captured on CCTV during Myanmar earthquake

Dramatic CCTV video of fault slip during a recent large earthquake in Myanmar thrilled both scientists and casual observers when it was posted to YouTube. But it was on his fifth or sixth viewing, said geophysicist Jesse Kearse, that he spotted something even more exciting. When Kearse and his colleague Yoshihiro Kaneko at Kyoto University analyzed the video more carefully, they concluded that it had captured the first direct visual evidence of curved fault slip. Earthquake geologists often observe curved slickenlines, the scrape marks created ...

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Earth Science16 Jul 2025

Tiny crystals provide insight to massive 2006 Augustine Volcano eruption

Samples of extremely small crystal clots, each polished to the thickness of a human hair or thinner, have revealed information about the process triggering the major 2006 eruption of Alaska’s Augustine Volcano. Graduate student researcher Valerie Wasser at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute determined that the addition of hot new magma into Augustine’s reservoir of cooler, older magma increased the pressure enough to trigger the 2006 eruption. Wasser’s analysis of Augustine crystal clots was published May 29 in Geology, the journal ...

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Earth Science15 Jul 2025

Scientists find the first ice core from the European Alps that dates back to the last Ice Age

Glaciers hold layers of history preserved in ice, offering unique insights into Earth's past that can also help us interpret the future. Trapped amidst the frozen water are microscopic deposits of dust, pollen, and even pollutants that scientists can use to examine environmental changes through time. DRI’s Ice Core Lab has used this technique to highlight atmospheric lead pollution and economic turbulence in Ancient Rome. Now, their latest study found that a glacier in the French Alps dates back to the last Ice Age – the oldest known glacier ice in the region. Serving as a record that spans through the development of agriculture ...

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Earth Science15 Jul 2025

Ancient fault line poses future earthquake hazard in Canada’s North

New research led by the University of Victoria (UVic) has illuminated a significant and previously unrecognized source of seismic hazard for the Yukon Territory of northwestern Canada. The Tintina fault is a major geologic fault approximately 1,000 km long that trends northwestward across the entire territory. It has slipped laterally a total of 450 km in its lifetime but was previously believed to have been inactive for at least 40 million years. However, using new high-resolution topographic data collected from satellites, airplanes and drones, researchers have identified a 130-km-long segment of the fault near Dawson City where there is evidence ...

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Earth Science14 Jul 2025

Answers to existence of alien life might be found in Earth’s deep-sea volcanoes

AMHERST, Mass. — While popular culture commonly depicts extraterrestrial life as little green men with large, oval-shaped heads, it’s most likely that if there is life beyond our planet and within our solar system, it is microbial. Recently, NASA awarded University of Massachusetts Amherst microbiologist James Holden $621,000 to spend the next three years using his expertise to help predict what life on Jupiter’s moon Europa might look like. For that, Holden turned to an unexpected place: the volcanoes a mile beneath our own oceans. Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has a frozen surface, but astronomers believe that beneath all that ice lies a salty, liquid ocean ...

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Earth Science9 Jul 2025

WSU study provides detailed look at the declining groundwater in regional aquifer system

PULLMAN, Wash. -- Groundwater is declining across Eastern Washington’s complex, interconnected aquifer system, as people draw on it for irrigation, drinking and other uses at a pace that threatens its sustainability, according to a new study by a Washington State University researcher. In certain “hot spots” – such as the Odessa region and the Yakima Basin – the rates of decline are particularly significant, with groundwater levels dropping two to three feet a year or more. The data is built ...

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