Geoscience

Raquel Negrete-Aranda says studying the ocean’s “plumbing” can tell us a lot about life, both under and above the sea.

To change the status quo of a notoriously destructive industry, Aether found a way to produce a cleaner and more ethical diamond.

The new volcanic fissures are more otherworldly than they first appear.

Precious stones hold the stories of continents, oceans, and cultures.

Author Robert MacFarlane on the awe and horror of subterranean places.

The joy and toll of doing remote science.

On a raft trip down the Green River, a writer faces her environmental preconceptions.

Meet the avalanche engineers of the Subzero Laboratory.

The plan for an artificial Martian magnetosphere may sound “fanciful,” but researchers say that emerging research is starting to show that a miniature magnetosphere can be used to protect humans and spacecraft.NASA Earth is most fortunate to have vast webs of magnetic fields surrounding it. Without them, much of our atmosphere would have been gradually […]

One astronomer has taken to U.S. National Parks to rekindle an old romance.

Seabed 2030 uses multibeam bathymetry data collection. “You can get very high resolution, down to centimeters, if you bring the sonar very close to the bottom,” says Larry Mayer.GEBCO Larry Mayer, a marine geophysicist, gets shivers when he looks at a night sky of stars. He understands why we explore outer space and NASA has […]

To understand turbulence we need the intuitive perspective of art.

A climate scientist asks whether nature can save us from ourselves.

Scientists are blocking out the light of distant suns to look for life.

A trip to a Louisiana river delta reveals an ecosystem that is growing up.

A scientist tells us how her field instills timefulness.

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

Virtual and augmented reality diversify geoscience education

Love notes and warning messages are buried in Earth’s frozen archive.

Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.

In sprawling Florida, one group of geologists is never short on business.

How a star explosion may have shaped life on Earth.

The quest to uncover the thousands of unknown mineral species.

We are ignoring the gains that balance the losses.

North America’s modern rivers came from an extensive system larger than today’s Amazon.

How science can help us prepare for hurricanes, and rebuild after them.

The Gaia hypothesis implies that once alien life takes hold, it will flourish.

A day in the war between the city and its mountains.

A journey to the underwater volcanoes where life may have erupted.

The nation's political center is also home to a rich geological history, found in both natural rock outcrops and the diverse suite of evocative building stones and monuments.

Exploring the wonders of an ancient world.

The problem is here.

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine. The Earth has endured many changes in its 4.5-billion-year history, with some tumultuous twists and turns along the way. One especially dramatic episode appears to have come between 700 million and 600 million years ago, when scientists think ice smothered the entire planet, from the poles to the […]

Elon Musk wants to engineer Mars’ atmosphere. Can he?

The author of The Martian and Artemis argues that the moon’s ice caps (blue) don’t change how he would design his fictional moon bases.NASA / JPL When I wrote The Martian, the general belief was that Mars had very little water, and what supply it did have would be at the poles. After the book came out, Curiosity […]

To imagine the absence of the Arctic and Antarctica produces something like the opposite of sublime, a pang of emptiness and a longing to appreciate that terrain in person before it passes.Image by NASA / Wikicommons Beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, an ocean dwells. Traces of it get expelled skyward through […]

The wind shifts. The stench of rotten eggs makes it nearly impossible to breathe and the hot fog clouds my view. I hold my breath and close my eyes, imagining the fog growing thicker, crushing me. Then without warning the wind clears and I’m enveloped once again in the cold, dry air. The heat feels […]

The Arctic Ocean could become a critical laboratory for understanding the process of climate change.

The chemistry of life is an extension of the chemistry of the Earth.

Our estimates for the prevalence of life in the universe depend on how quickly it arose on Earth.

An RNA molecule that can make copies of a variety of RNAs adds new support to the RNA-world theory.

Life on other planets may rely on plate tectonics.

Humans have been trying to predict earthquakes at least since first-century China, when the device of choice was a vessel fitted with metal dragons facing each compass direction. If the ground shook somewhere in the region, the metal ball in the dragon’s mouth would drop out, roughly indicating the direction of the earthquake. Our methods […]

Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.

Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.

Now that we’re nearly into the second week of our “Currents” issue, I thought it’d be fitting to recall our interview with Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University and the director of its Carl Sagan Institute. Before Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar came out, in 2014, Kaltenegger sat down with Nautilus to discuss her work, and she rhapsodized about the physics and […]

  One of the criteria that make a Scotch a Scotch is that it’s made with Scottish water. That means that a clever connoisseur should be able to tell whether her drink is authentic by tracing the source of its H2O molecules. But how? After it’s collected and filtered of impurities, water is water, right? […]