Earth Sciences

The spectacular rift valleys of the Tibetan plateau don’t all run north-south as previously thought, according to new research.

The rift valleys actually curve away — some to the east, some to the west — from the point where India is punching into the gut of Tibet. “Everyone looked at the rifts and said they went north-south,” said Paul Kapp, assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “I looked and said — they’re not.” His work contrad

In 1875 the remains of a prehistoric crocodile were found in the brown coal mine at Messel near Darmstadt; since then a large number of well preserved fossils have also been discovered. Palaeontologists have long puzzled over what could have been the reason for this annihilation of so many creatures. In the latest issue of the Paläontologische Zeitschrift (‘Journal of Palaeontology’) researchers from the University of Bonn have put forward a new theory: the cause of the deaths of these animals m

An international team of scientists is currently evaluating sediment cores collected during the Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, conducted under the auspices of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). ACEX, conducted in August and September this year, is an exploration success story. At a press conference in the University of Bremen, Germany, today (16 November 2004) the co-chief scientists of the expedition described the first results from this expedition.

Scientists from

A new tool based on satellite data shows trends in the way Europeans use our landscape. Seen from the ground these changes appear gradual, but viewed from above they are often dramatic.

Each day new roads or buildings bury the equivalent of 240 football fields of German soil, around 120 hectares of land. This is just one example of the information available from a new virtual atlas of Europe’s landscape based on satellite data.
The European Environment Agency (EEA), assi

High in the mountains of Antarctica, Ohio State University geologists unearthed the fossil remains of a 180-million-year-old clam-like creature that was preserved in a very unusual way: by the ancient bacteria that devoured it.

And only yards away, they found the first fossil evidence of a completely different kind of bacteria that scientists were unsure even existed as fossils that long ago.

The first find answers one of the most fundamental questions in paleontology —

A long-dry riverbed in northeastern Ohio is preventing a pool of chemical waste from infiltrating the Ohio River, geologists have found.

The finding may call into question the need to clean up similar chemical waste sites. It also indicates a previously unknown interaction between an underground aquifer and the nearby Ohio River. Beneath sand and gravel on the grounds of Barium and Chemical Inc. in Steubenville, OH, lies an aquifer that contains chemicals such as nitrate and bari