Earth Sciences

Cornell University researchers have created a video simulation of the deadly Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that shows in graphic detail how the massive wave system spread outward from the epicenter of an undersea earthquake northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia.

The simulation makes it clear how the tsunami struck the coastlines of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India with such devastating force, then continued as far as East Africa.

The video, about 7 MB, can be seen o

The second Duke University-led expedition since 1999 to a deep underwater canyon will take geologists to another place in the eastern Pacific Ocean where new sea floor was forged out of volcanic lava within the past several million years.

The Pito Deep trough, positioned as deep as 19,600 feet below the ocean’s surface just west of Easter Island, will offer scientists a rare chance to study the internal geology of such ocean floor crust making processes.

The internal g

More than 250 new examples of England’s finest array of prehistoric rock art carvings, sited close to the Scottish border, have been discovered by archaeologists compiling a unique database.

Now over one thousand of the ’cup and ring’ carvings can be admired on a new website, which carries 6,000 images and is said to be the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. The site, which goes live today, includes the 250 panels unearthed during a two-and-a-half year t

The African continent is slowly being pulled apart and new data collected by University of Leeds and Royal Holloway, University of London researchers suggests that molten rock from deep within the Earth is helping the rifting. Their findings, which help explain how continents split apart, are published in Nature this week.

Ethiopia sits on a boundary where a tectonic plate is being split into two and over several million years a new ocean basin is forming. The movement of plates o

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced that it will conduct an urgent study of the large-scale earthquake which occurred off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia on December 26, 2004. The study will be the first to observe the actual epicenter of the earthquake that devastated coastal regions in Asian countries along the Indian Ocean coastline.

JAMSTEC is a partner in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program that

The January issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: new insights into conditions during the Neoproterozoic and Cryogenian; evidence challenging a widely used method for dating rocks; mathematical descriptions of sand ripples that may aid understanding of water flow on planetary surfaces; and evidence questioning whether Akilia Island’s metamorphic rocks really contain Earth’s earliest signs of life. GSA TODAY’s science article focuses