When most people think of the Antarctic, they think of snow, ice and glaciers - but the continent and surrounding waters are littered with fiery volcanoes. The Marie Byrd Seamounts in the Amundsen…

Tiny crystals of zircon, a mineral found in the igneous rock rhyolites, from the Snake River Plain in the Yellowstone hotspot has solidified evidence for a new way of looking at the life cycle of…

Rocky basalt pillars that litter Iceland's Skaelingar valley likely formed in a surprising reaction where lava met water - but without any explosion occurring. The authors of a new paper say that non…

The earliest evidence of a comet entering Earth's atmosphere and exploding has been found. It rained down a shock wave of fire which obliterated every life form in its path, has been found.  The…

I can remember a time when I thought of dirt as something that only seemed to change about it was the color. I had noticed it when my family took vacations and even in looking at the soils in my…

Geologists and geophysicists have discovered traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia, confirming for the first time that within the past…

The first rock that scientists analyzed on Mars with a pair of chemical instruments aboard the Curiosity rover turned out to be a doozy – a pyramid-shaped volcanic rock called a "mugearite" that is…

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sampled a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route during its first few months on Mars. And what it has found tells a complex story about…

Deep earthquakes occur where the oceanic lithosphere, driven by tectonics, plunges under continental plates – examples are off the coasts of the western United States, Russia and Japan. Some new…

Chaotic terrains are enigmatic features stretching up to hundreds of kilometres across Mars. The mechanism by which they formed is hypothesis and even speculation in most cases. A recent paper, which…