Earth Sciences

The most northerly active volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is once again erupting, dusting the surrounding snow-white landscape with a wide expanse of dark ash that is visible from 800 km away in space.

This image of the Kamchatka Peninsula on Russia’s East Coast was acquired on 11 May 2004 by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on ESA’s Envisat satellite in reduced resolution mode.

Two thirds of the way up the Peninsula can be seen

Evidence is mounting that 251 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs dominated the Earth, a meteor the size of Mount Everest smashed into what is now northern Australia, heaving rock halfway around the globe, triggering mass volcanic eruptions, and wiping out all but about ten percent of the species on the planet. The “Great Dying,” as it’s called, was by far the most cataclysmic extinction event in Earth’s history, yet scientists have been unable to finger a culprit as they have with

People in the central and eastern United States and Canada are used to the idea that the land they live on — its variety of hills, lakes and rivers — are left over from the great mile-thick ice sheets that covered the area 18,000 years ago.

They may, however, be surprised to learn that today, long after the glaciers melted, an international research team led by Northwestern University geologists using the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites can “see” the land moving — up to half a

July 2003 saw a significant discovery in Ecuador by IRD archaeologists: 4000-year-old structures indicating the presence of one of the first great Andean civilizations in the upper Amazon Basin, where their presence had not been suspected. The site is at Santa Ana- La Florida in the south of Ecuador. Subsequent systematic excavations of other parts of the site led to the discovery of sophisticated architectural complexes. Among these are a tomb and a range of diverse vestiges: ceramic bottles, plain

Through the cycads and gingkoes of the floodplains, not far from the Sundance Sea, strode the 50-foot-long Suuwassea, a plant-eating dinosaur with a whip-like tail and an anomalous second hole in its skull destined to puzzle paleontologists in 150 million years. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Suuwassea emilieae (pronounced SOO-oo-WAH-see-uh eh-MEE-LEE-aye) is a smaller relative of Diplodocus and Apatosaurus and is the first named sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic of s

Ohio State University geologists and their colleagues have used two water-testing methods together for the first time to help a Gulf Coast tourist community manage its water supply.

The two methods could prove useful for gauging how rising sea levels — one of the possible effects of global climate change — might cause salt water to infiltrate drinking water along coastal areas in the future.

Anne Carey, assistant professor of geological sciences at Ohio State, likened Baldwin Cou