Asteroid Collision Led to the Mass Extinction of Lizards and Snakes
A newly published study details the mass extinction of lizards and snakes that occurred after an asteroid struck the Earth 65.5 million years ago, finding…
Geophysics News
Carbon Locked in Arctic Permafrost Will Contribute to Global Warming
Fresh concerns are being expressed about the carbon locked in the Arctic’s permafrost. New studies presented at the American Geophysical Union quantify the amount of…
Impact May Have Deformed Saturn’s Moon Iapetus
One of the strangest moons in the Solar System is Saturn’s Iapetus, which features an enormous equatorial mountain ridge and spiky belt that rises 12…
5-Mile Wide Buried Asteroid Crater Discovered in Canada
A 5-mile wide and 3,000-foot deep asteroid impact crater has been hidden near Bow City, Alberta, for millions of years. Bow City has been deserted…
Titan’s Icy Outer Crust Is Likely Twice As Thick as Previously Believed
Using radar data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a new analysis of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, suggests that it has an icy, rocky core with a…
Low Arctic Snow Cover Could be Trouble for Permafrost
June Arctic snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere dropped by almost 18% per decade over the last 30 years. This drop in snow cover will…
Xenon Gas Has Almost Vanished From the Atmosphere
Xenon, the second heaviest of the chemically inert noble gases, seems to have vanished from the Earth’s atmosphere; but German geoscientists think that they figured…
Unusual Indian Ocean Earthquakes May Signal Tectonic Breakup
On April 11th, 2012 a pair of massive earthquakes rocked the Indian Ocean. Scientists think that these may be the latest step in the formation…
Coniophis Precedens, The Most Primitive Known Snake
In a published study titled “A transitional snake from the Late Cretaceous of North America,” Yale researchers argue that snakes descend from terrestrial ancestors and…
Experimental Evidence Verifies High-Pressure Structure for Cold-Compressed Graphite
Using high-pressure experiments, Yale researchers confirmed in a published study the structure of cold-compressed graphite for the first time, possibly opening the door for uses…
Data Suggests the Possible Ice on the Moon at Shackleton Crater
Using a laser altimeter on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, a team of scientists has mapped Shackleton crater with unprecedented detail, finding possible evidence for…
Carbon Sequestration Likely to Cause Intraplate Earthquakes
A recently published paper from Stanford scientists suggests that carbon sequestration is likely to create pressure build-up large enough cause intraplate earthquakes, breaking the reservoirs’…
MIT Researchers Use Mathematical Model to Predict Speed of Spreading Valleys
Researchers in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) have developed a mathematical model that gauges how fast the Apalachicola Bluffs and valleys…
