Earth Sciences

An embryonic rift valley in Botswana, the southwestern extension of the East African Rift System, where some of the earliest hominids have been discovered, may also hold answers to continental breakup, according to a University of Missouri-Rolla geologist who is studying how the rift has formed.

“This rift will provide us with an early snapshot of how continental rifting all begins,” says Dr. Estella Atekwana, an associate professor of geology and geophysics at UMR. The study of rift basins

Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA’s ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these ’rogue’ waves and are now being used to study their origins.

Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in

While rovers and orbiting spacecraft scour Mars searching for clues to its past, researchers have uncovered another piece of the red planet in the most inhospitable place on Earth — Antarctica.

The new specimen was found by a field party from the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) on Dec. 15, 2003, on an ice field in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 750 kilometers from the South Pole. This 715.2-gram black rock, officially designated MIL 03346, w

The exploration of near-Earth space will enter a new phase on 26 July when a spacecraft called Tan Ce 2 (Explorer 2) lifts off from Taiyuan spaceport, west of Beijing, on a Chinese Long March 2C rocket. The launch is currently scheduled to take place at 08:23 BST (07:23 GMT).

Tan Ce 2 is the second spacecraft to be built for the Double Star programme, a unique collaboration between Chinese and European scientists. Its predecessor, Tan Ce 1 (Explorer 1), was successfully launched on a sim

Collisions in the Asteroid Belt result in the asteroids being completely destroyed and shattered into countless pieces. Computer simulations predict that most of these fragments will eventually fall into the Sun. Some of them, however, will hit the Earth after millions of years as meteorites. It is possible that this could also occur much earlier. In certain positions in the Asteroid Belt, the orbiting time of an object around the sun is a multiple of the orbit of the giant planet Jupiter. The so-

The gradual subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate puts tremendous stress on the seafloor, creating cracks and fissures, hydrothermal vents, seafloor spreading, and literally hundreds of small earthquakes on a near-daily basis.
Now a North American team of scientists has documented for the first time a new phenomenon – the creation of a void in the seafloor that draws in – rather than expels – surrounding seawater. They report their discovery in the July 15 issue