Geoscience
52 articles-
Why We Should Explore the Hottest Places in the Ocean
Raquel Negrete-Aranda says studying the ocean’s “plumbing” can tell us a lot about life, both under and above the sea.
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How to Turn Air Pollution into Gleaming Diamonds
To change the status quo of a notoriously destructive industry, Aether found a way to produce a cleaner and more ethical diamond.
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Iceland’s Eruptions Reveal the Hot History of Mars
The new volcanic fissures are more otherworldly than they first appear.
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Cloud-Making Aerosol Could Devastate Polar Sea Ice
An overlooked but powerful driver of cloud formation could accelerate the loss of polar sea ice.
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How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)
Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change.
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The Supervolcano Under Yellowstone Is Alive and Kicking
Around 10,000 geothermal features in Yellowstone hint at a mysterious hot spot beneath the crust.
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New Earthquake Math Predicts How Destructive They’ll Be
The “pinball” model of a slipping fault line borrows from the mathematics of avalanches.
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Once Upon a Gemstone
Precious stones hold the stories of continents, oceans, and cultures.
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Why We’re Drawn Into Darkness
Author Robert MacFarlane on the awe and horror of subterranean places.
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Why These Researchers Are Drawn to the World’s Edge
The joy and toll of doing remote science.
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The Dam Problem in the West
On a raft trip down the Green River, a writer faces her environmental preconceptions.
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How a Snowflake Turns Into an Avalanche
Meet the avalanche engineers of the Subzero Laboratory.
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How to Give Mars an Atmosphere, Maybe
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 […]
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Falling in Love With the Dark
One astronomer has taken to U.S. National Parks to rekindle an old romance.
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Why We Need to Map the Ocean Floor
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 […]
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The Scientific Problem That Must Be Experienced
To understand turbulence we need the intuitive perspective of art.
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The Hidden Importance of Clouds
A climate scientist asks whether nature can save us from ourselves.
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Looking for a Second Earth in the Shadows
Scientists are blocking out the light of distant suns to look for life.
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The Birth and Death of a Landscape
A trip to a Louisiana river delta reveals an ecosystem that is growing up.
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Geology Makes You Time-Literate
A scientist tells us how her field instills timefulness.
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The Dueling Weathermen of the 1800s
This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.
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Fieldwork Among the Pixels
Virtual and augmented reality diversify geoscience education
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Secrets in the Ice
Love notes and warning messages are buried in Earth’s frozen archive.
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The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster
Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.
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The Sinkhole Hunters
In sprawling Florida, one group of geologists is never short on business.
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The Secret History of the Supernova at the Bottom of the Sea
How a star explosion may have shaped life on Earth.
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Data-Driven Discovery Reveals Earth’s Missing Minerals
The quest to uncover the thousands of unknown mineral species.
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Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?
We are ignoring the gains that balance the losses.
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The Paleo-Bell River: North America’s Vanished Amazon
North America’s modern rivers came from an extensive system larger than today’s Amazon.
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Wind or Water? Hurricane Harvey’s Most Destructive Force
How science can help us prepare for hurricanes, and rebuild after them.
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Why Most Planets Will Either Be Lush or Dead
The Gaia hypothesis implies that once alien life takes hold, it will flourish.
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Los Angeles Should Be Buried
A day in the war between the city and its mountains.
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In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun
A journey to the underwater volcanoes where life may have erupted.
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Travels in Geology: Touring the Capital Geology of Washington, D.C.
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.
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Travels in Geology: The Pyramids of Giza
Exploring the wonders of an ancient world.
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Dutch Masters: The Netherlands Exports Flood-Control Expertise
The problem is here.
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Glaciers May Have Covered the Entire Planet—Twice
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 […]
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Should We Terraform Mars? Let’s Recap
Elon Musk wants to engineer Mars’ atmosphere. Can he?
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Why Lunar Ice Caps Don’t Change My Moon Base Design
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 […]
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Why Enceladus’ Ice Is Part of the Climate Change Conversation
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 […]
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The Supervolcano Under Yellowstone Is Alive and Kicking
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 […]
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An Arctic Early Warning System?
The Arctic Ocean could become a critical laboratory for understanding the process of climate change.
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The Primordial Fertility of Rock
The chemistry of life is an extension of the chemistry of the Earth.
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When Did Life on Earth Begin?
Our estimates for the prevalence of life in the universe depend on how quickly it arose on Earth.
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A New Step in Re-Creating First Life on Earth
An RNA molecule that can make copies of a variety of RNAs adds new support to the RNA-world theory.
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Why Aliens and Volcanoes Go Together
Life on other planets may rely on plate tectonics.
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7 Ways Humans Have Tried to Predict Earthquakes
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 […]
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The Fly in the Primordial Soup
Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.
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The Fly in the Primordial Soup
Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.
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A Water World Would Be the Ultimate Surfing Spot
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 […]
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These Gorgeous Water Maps Are Helping Identify Fake Scotch and Murder Victims
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? […]