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Categories: Geoscience: Geology, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

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New high-resolution images of the Long Valley Caldera indicate that the subsurface environment is cooling off, releasing gas and fluids that contribute to seismic activity.

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Formed millions to billions of years ago, diamonds can shine light into the darkest and oldest parts of the Earth's mantle. The analysis of ancient, superdeep diamonds dug up from mines in Brazil and Western Africa, has exposed new processes of how continents evolved and moved during the early evolution of complex life on Earth. These diamonds that were formed between 650 and 450 million years ago on the base of the supercontinent Gondwana, were analysed by an international team of experts, and have shown how supercontinents such as Gondwana were formed, stabilised, and how they move around the planet.

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Surface ice in Greenland has been melting at an increasing rate in recent decades, while the trend in Antarctica has moved in the opposite direction, according to researchers.

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A 13-million-year-old saber-toothed marsupial skeleton discovered during paleontological explorations in Colombia is the most complete specimen recovered in the region.

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The hunt for the world’s most ancient mammals descended into academic warfare in the seventies, researchers have discovered.

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Geologists have reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. The team had predicted its existence over 10 years ago based on fragments of old tectonic plates found deep in the Earth’s mantle. To the lead researchers surprise, she found that oceanic remnants on northern Borneo must have belonged to the long-suspected plate, which scientists have named Pontus. She has now reconstructed the entire plate in its full glory.

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New research has revealed that since the 1980s, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes (maximum wind speed greater than 131 miles per hour) have been arriving three to four days earlier with each passing decade of climate change.

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For decades, scientists have assumed that mammals and their relatives that survived challenging times (like those during mass extinctions) made it because they were generalists that were able to eat just about anything and adapt to whatever life threw at them. A new study into the mammal family tree through multiple mass extinctions revealed that the species that survived aren't as generic as scientists had thought: instead, having new and different traits can be the key to succeeding in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

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New research has overturned the traditional view that natural rock weathering acts as a carbon sink that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Instead, this can also act as a large CO2 source, rivaling that of volcanoes.

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To bridge the knowledge gap between volcanologists and atmospheric scientists working on climate change and observing global systems, researchers have characterized volcanic ash samples from many explosive eruptions of a broad compositional range.

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Researchers working to image New Zealand's Hikurangi earthquake fault have uncovered a sea's worth of water buried in the Earth's crust. The water was carried down by eroding volcanic rocks and is believed to be dampening the earthquake fault, allowing it to release most of the pent-up tectonic stress through harmless slow slip earthquakes.

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An international team of researchers has released a landmark study on contemporary evolutionary change in natural populations. Their study uses one of the largest genomic datasets ever produced for animals in their natural environment, comprising nearly 4,000 Darwin's finches. The study has revealed the genetic basis of adaptation in this iconic group.

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In a new study, researchers examined the waxy coatings of leaves preserved as organic molecules within sediment from the early-to-middle Holocene, a period of intense warming that occurred due to slow changes in Earth's orbit 11,700 to 4,200 years ago. They found that warming potentially could lead to a previously under-appreciated flux in methane emissions from lakes.

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The mechanism facilitating the smooth movement of the oceanic lithosphere over the underlying asthenosphere (upper mantle) remains poorly understood. Recently, researchers from Japan investigated the effect of water on the seismic properties of olivine rocks, finding that water retention in the asthenosphere can induce sharp drops in shear wave velocity. This also explained other seismic changes observed at the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary. These findings provide invaluable insights into the diverse seismic activities on Earth.

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A new study shows unprecedented heat is likely to lead to the next mass extinction, akin to when the dinosaurs died out, eliminating nearly all mammals in some 250 million years time.

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When Charles Darwin traveled to the Galapagos Islands almost 200 years ago as a gentleman naturalist, he used the power of observation to develop his theory that species evolve over time.

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Palaeontologists have discovered X-ray evidence of proteins in fossil feathers that sheds new light on feather evolution.

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Marine virologists analyzed sediment from the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth, and identified a new bacteriophage.

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Researchers studying diamond-rich rocks from Western Australia's Argyle volcano have identified the missing third key ingredient needed to bring valuable pink diamonds to the Earth's surface where they can be mined, which could greatly help in the global hunt for new deposits.

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A new study shows the isolation and sequencing of more than a century-old RNA molecules from a Tasmanian tiger specimen preserved at room temperature in a museum collection. This resulted in the reconstruction of skin and skeletal muscle transcriptomes from an extinct species for the first time. The researchers note that their findings have relevant implications for international efforts to resurrect extinct species, including both the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth, as well as for studying pandemic RNA viruses.