Earth Sciences

In the first study to directly measure when and how quickly rivers outside of growing mountain ranges cut through rock, geologists at the University of Vermont have determined that it was about 35,000 years ago that the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers, respectively, began carving out the Great Falls of the Potomac and Holtwood Gorge. Great Falls, located about 15 miles outside of Washington, D.C., hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year; Holtwood Gorge lies along the Susquehanna River, nea

Although it covers more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, much of the deep sea remains unknown and unexplored, and many questions remain about how its environment changes over time.

A new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has shed new light on significant changes in the deep sea over a 14-year period. Scripps Institution’s Henry Ruhl and Ken Smith show in the new issue of the journal Science that changes in climate at

Invitation to a press conference for the start of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, on board the icebreaker Oden in the port of Tromsø, Norway on Friday 6 August 2004 at 11.00

Three icebreakers will carry a team of international scientists to the Arctic Ocean next month (8 August), to study its geological history. The Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, aims to reach several hundreds of metres into the sediments of the Lomonosov Ridge, an unde

These images of ‘yardangs’, features sculpted by wind-blown sand seen here near Olympus Mons on Mars, were obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the ESA Mars Express spacecraft.

This image was taken during orbit 143 with a resolution of 20 metres per pixel. This scene shows a structure south of Olympus Mons at 6° N latitude and 220° E longitude, which was probably formed by the action of the wind. Loose sand fragments were transported by wind, and impacted on the be

The lowermost region of the earth’s mantle, the D” layer, has presented great problems to geophysicists for a long time. This irregularly bounded layer, which is about 150 kilometres thick on average, shows very different physical properties to those lying above. The reason why the Earth’s mantle at the interface to the core should have such anomalous structure and properties could not be convincingly explained until now. Artem R. Oganov from the Laboratory for Cristallography at ETH Zurich and Shig

Within the €3.6 million EU research project PROMESS1 (PROfiles across MEditerranean Sedimentary Systems), with an EU contribution of €2.7 million, European scientists have collected 500 000 year-old sediment cores from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. These samples will allow researchers to reconstruct climate variations since pre-historic times, thus providing keys for understanding what is happening to Earth’s climate now. Ocean drilling is crucial in understanding changes in climate, as the s