Geology 2023, March
In the fossilized sedimentary deposits at the bottom of the former ocean, scientists noticed high folds that were left by the passage of a tsunami caused by an asteroid that crowned the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction
Scientists have always assumed that in the early stages of its existence, our planet was attacked by large and small celestial bodies. But a new study showed that the number of these impacts could be 10 times more than previously thought, and some asteroids at the same time had a scale comparable to the city
A unique study of ancient diamonds showed that the chemical composition of the atmosphere of our planet, which makes it suitable for the active development of life, was laid down at least 2.7 billion years ago
Scientists have found that the change in the orbit of our planet may have triggered the emergence and development of complex life during the period of global glaciation
At a depth of a couple of kilometers under the volcanoes, reservoirs of hot and concentrated solution are formed, rich in copper, gold and other metals: they can be extracted from this liquid, at the same time receiving geothermal electricity
Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed and tested a method for recording tremors using instruments in balloons. In the same way, promising research vehicles, which will be located in the relatively safe upper layers of its atmosphere, can study the bowels of Venus. And it is not yet possible to place long-term seismometers on the surface of this planet
Scientists believe that melt water, which had accumulated for a long time in a deep lake on the surface of the Emery Glacier, split the ice mass and quickly flowed into the ocean
An international team of researchers has studied the geology and conditions for the existence of the largest sea in the history of the planet - Paratethys
A huge piece of ice floating freely in the Weddell Sea, located between the Antarctic Peninsula in the west and Cotes Land in the east, is almost twice the area of the capital of Russia
Global warming cannot but affect the earth's climate, but how it will change specifically is difficult to predict. An international team of researchers analyzed more than one and a half hundred scientific papers to answer at least one question: will the risk of floods increase or decrease if the average annual temperature on Earth continues to rise? The result was, as is often the case, ambiguous, but the news is definitely bad for city dwellers
Scientists have found that the continental crust formed half a billion years earlier than previously thought. This is critical to understanding plate tectonics and biological evolution
Experiments have shown that the earth's core can contain a significant amount of hydrogen, which got there as a result of meteorite bombardments billions of years ago. If this hydrogen was not trapped in the core, the Earth may never have formed land and was a watery world
The US Bureau of Reclamation has published a two-year forecast of the hydrological situation in the Colorado River Basin. According to the available data, this year it will receive an incredibly small amount of water from mountain runoff and precipitation. Relevant Governments and Infrastructure Organizations Prepare to Declare a Declaration of Water Scarcity at the Federal Level for the First Time in United States History
Shallow and small magma reservoirs are rarely seen on seismographic surveys, but they can determine the activity of volcanoes
Scientists have discovered a natural "gateway" to earthquakes. They "stop" cataclysms and do not allow them to rise to a magnitude of 8 and above
Soon after the end of the ice age, a powerful blow from a celestial body hit the Earth. As a result, mammoths and other large animals began to die out. Let's try to figure out how and why this happened
The Gulf Stream and other currents of the Atlantic Ocean, the common system of which redistributes heat across our planet and has a great influence on the climate, now move more slowly than about 1000-1600 years ago
Scientists from Texas applied a new method of radioisotope analysis and specified the age of a centipede fossil found on a Scottish island. It turned out that she is 75 million years younger than previously thought
The fossil discovered in the south of England recorded a paleobiological event that happened about 200 million years ago, and became a unique illustration of how recklessly and cruelly ancient mollusks were hunted
Everyone knows that oil is hydrocarbons. But where did it come from? Is it true that of the dinosaurs? And how many millions of years is the oil from which gasoline and hundreds of other important things around us are made today? We figure out what oil reserves lie in Russia and how many of them remain, why they have not yet been extracted, and also how this is related to creatures that lived millions of years ago
Scientists for the first time examined the flows of iron lava, unlike the lava of molten silicates, which are ejected by ordinary volcanoes
The movement of the plates of the earth's crust could begin in the Middle Archean with the hit of a heavy asteroid in a thin section of the lithosphere
Laboratory experiments and computer simulations have shown that heavy isotopes of iron are capable of migrating from the earth's core into the mantle, and then being thrown out onto the surface with volcanic lava
In the era in which the emergence of life, the Earth could have practically no land
Scientists in the United States used groundbreaking techniques to figure out how the Earth's atmosphere was filled with oxygen billions of years ago
The Earth's magnetosphere was strong enough even before the planet had an inner core and the mechanism of the "geomagnetic dynamo" began to work: it seems that at the first stages it was fueled by a completely different mechanism
In the first billions of years of our planet's existence, its magnetic field could be created without the participation of the core - directly by molten magma
New accurate observations of seismic waves passing through the center of the planet have confirmed that its solid inner core is rotating slightly faster than the surface
To obtain exotic forms of carbon, scientists squeezed the diamond with record force, but it retained its structure even at the maximum pressure that was achieved
For a long time, hydrologists puzzled over the mystery of the island of Hawaii - for unknown reasons, there was much less water in its underground aquifers than it should be given the amount of precipitation. Now it has been solved: the study of the electrical conductivity of water at different depths off the coast made it possible to find whole underground rivers that emerge from the bottom at a distance of up to four kilometers from the coastline
Diamonds are formed at high temperatures and pressures in the interior of the earth. Most of them are born in the upper layers of the mantle, at the base of massive
The question of when the largest river in Asia formed has been the subject of controversy for over a century. Researchers from China and the Netherlands have shed light on this mystery
Simulations have shown that in a billion years, the atmosphere of our planet will experience dramatic changes and lose all its oxygen, throwing life back to the most ancient anaerobic forms
In August last year, scientists noticed a "floating island" in the Pacific Ocean, which was formed as a result of the eruption of the Tonga submarine ridge of volcanoes. Exactly a year later, a colossus the size of 20,000 football fields landed on the eastern shores of Australia. Scientists pin their hopes on the volcanic rock raft to save the dying Great Barrier Reef
The future colonists of the Red Planet, of course, will not be able to take with them a huge supply of terrestrial soil in order to "fertilize" the impoverished Martian "land" with them. American scientists were puzzled by this problem and found a way out: they developed artificial soil mixtures that mimic the Martian soil, and preliminary estimated its fertility
A mass of urban buildings and infrastructure pushes the ground beneath a large city, causing a localized sink in the land surface
German scientists have found that the deepest parts of the Black Sea are still responding to climate change caused by the last ice age, which ended 11,590 years ago
The more glaciers on Earth, the less water in the oceans of the planet - this is a completely logical idea, however, was not confirmed in the data on the last ice age. The information about the level of the World Ocean does not coincide with the models of glaciation. An international team of paleoclimatologists was able to resolve this paradox. True, now some important methods of isotopic analysis of sedimentary cores will have to be revised
Geologists have traced climate fluctuations during an era when warming and cooling cycles succeeded each other much faster than today
Scientists have developed a model that calculates the rate of change in a mountainous landscape. With its help, it was possible to establish that the average annual precipitation affects the erosion of rocks and can deform mountains