Geology, features and articles | Educational Science

Feb 28, 2019

Melting Mount Everest Ice Is Exposing a Grisly Sight: Scores of Dead Bodies

Melting glaciers are revealing dozens of dead bodies on the world's tallest mountain, according to news reports. The treacherous journey to the summit of Mount Everest is riddled with obstacles — falling ice, ragged terrain, biting temperatures and incredible heights that cause altitude sickness. While nearly 5,000 people have successfully...

Jan 31, 2019

Snowball Earth: When the Blue Planet Went White

It's difficult to imagine now, but at certain points in Earth's history, ice covered the entire planet. This frozen Earth, nicknamed snowball Earth, was a setting so severe, that the Earth's entire surface, from pole to pole, including the oceans, completely froze over, said Melissa Hage, an environmental scientist and...

Jul 31, 2020

Ancient caiman with 'no parallel in the modern world' left 46 bite marks on sloth leg

About 13 million years ago, a ground sloth wandered too close to the water's edge, where a caiman lay waiting to strike. The attack likely happened in a flash, and ended with the caiman leaving nearly 50 tooth marks in the sloth's hind leg, a new study finds. Most of...

Feb 29, 2020

How do we tell the difference between geologic ages?

From the emergence of life to mass extinctions, Earth has gone through incredible changes in its 4.6 billion years. With so much history, how can researchers keep track of what happened when? The system many scientists have settled on is the International Geologic Time Scale (laid out here in the...

Dec 31, 2019

Extreme heat of Vesuvius eruption turned a man's brain to 'glass'

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, the volcano unleashed an avalanche of gas and rock hot enough to boil blood, vaporize flesh and even transform bits of brain tissue into glass, according to a new study. Archaeologists rarely uncover human brains during their digs, and if they do,...

Nov 30, 2021

'Wind' from Earth's middle layer blows through a secret passage beneath Panama

A geological secret passage beneath Panama may explain why rocks from Earth's mantle are found more than 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) from where they originated. This opening, located some 62 miles (100 km) below Earth's surface, may allow a flow of mantle materials to travel all the way from beneath...

Oct 31, 2021

Human-size ammonites swam the Atlantic Ocean 80 million years ago

About 80 million years ago, human-size sea creatures with tentacle-like arms and coiled shells up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) wide glided through the Atlantic Ocean, a new study reveals. These creatures were the world's largest ammonites, a group of shelled cephalopods that went extinct roughly 66 million years ago....

Aug 31, 2021

99 million-year-old spider mummies reveal moms cared for teeny spiderlings

Big-eyed spiders were likely guarding their egg sacs and possibly caring for already hatched spiderlings when they were trapped in sticky tree resin some 99 million years ago. That resin hardened, locking up those arachnid mamas in four chunks of amber recently mined in Myanmar, and now considered the oldest...

Jun 30, 2021

Perfectly preserved 310-million-year-old fossilized brain found

Researchers have uncovered a never-before-seen fossilized brain from a 310 million-year-old horseshoe crab, revealing some surprises about the evolution of these wannabe crustaceans, according to a new study. The fossilized brain, which belongs to the extinct species Euproops danae, was discovered at Mazon Creek in Illinois, where the conditions were...

May 31, 2021

Earth has a 'pulse' of 27.5 million years

Most major geological events in Earth's recent history have clustered in 27.5-million-year intervals — a pattern that scientists are now calling the pulse of the Earth, according to a new study. Over the past 260 million years, dozens of major geological events, from sea level changes to volcanic eruptions, seem...

Feb 28, 2021

Top-secret Cold War military project found perfectly preserved fossil plants under Greenland ice

Frozen soil that was collected in Greenland during the Cold War by a secret military operation hid another secret: buried fossils that could be a million years old. Recent analysis revealed plants that were so well-preserved they look like they died yesterday, researchers said. U.S. Army scientists dug up the...

Jan 31, 2021

Diamonds need an electric zap to crystallize deep inside Earth

Before diamonds can begin growing deep underground in Earth's mantle, they need a little zap from an electric field, a new study finds. In lab-based experiments, scientists mimicked conditions in the mantle — the layer just beneath Earth's crust — and found that diamonds grew only when exposed to an...

Jan 31, 2021

Vampire squid fossil 'lost' during the Hungarian Revolution rediscovered

Vampire squid have been lurking in the dark corners of the ocean for 30 million years, a new analysis of a long-lost fossil finds. Modern-day vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) can thrive in deep, oxygen-poor ocean water, unlike many other squid species that require shallower habitat along continental shelves. Few fossil...

Jun 30, 2022

Earth's crust is dripping 'like honey' into its interior under the Andes

Earth's crust is dripping like honey into our planet's hot interior beneath the Andes mountains, scientists have discovered. By setting up a simple experiment in a sandbox and comparing the results to actual geological data, researchers have found compelling evidence that Earth's crust has been avalanched away across hundreds of...

Jan 31, 2022

What's the oldest mountain range in the world? (How about the youngest?)

Mountains may look ancient — but some are mere toddlers, while others are great-grandaddies, geologically speaking. So, what is the oldest mountain range? And what about the youngest? In general, tall mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas, tend to be young, whereas ranges with shorter peaks from millennia of erosion,...