“There’s more than a billion years that’s gone,” said Barra Peak, co-author of a 2021 study on this puzzling gap in Earth’s ...

In the whole history of Earth's climate, few events are as extreme as those that geologists call "Snowball Earth." ...

The Department of Geology is about much more than rocks and minerals. Its faculty and students perform cutting-edge research on everything from how glaciers react to climate change to how molten lava ...

A thin slice of the ancient rocks collected from Gakkel Ridge near the North Pole, photographed under a microscope and seen under cross-polarized light. Field width ~ 14mm. Credit: E. Cottrell, ...

The discovery could usher in a wave of investigations into the evolution of Earth’s mantle, a layer of material about 1,800 miles deep that extends from just beneath the planet’s thin crust to its ...

A 2021 satellite photo shows off the recently uncovered Yilan crater in China, which is most likely the youngest impact structure on Earth. The incomplete ring is also the largest of its kind and only ...

At first glance, Mars might seem rather different from our own planet. Mars is dry, with little atmosphere, and no liquid water on its surface. It is half the size of Earth, lacks a planetary magnetic ...

Seismic mapping of North America has revealed that an ancient slab of crust buried beneath the Midwest is causing the crust above it to "drip" and suck down rocks from across the continent. When you ...

A thin slice of the ancient rocks collected from Gakkel Ridge near the North Pole, photographed under a microscope and seen under cross-polarized light. Field width ~ 14mm. Analyzing rocks in thin ...