News by Subject Earth Science

More than 80 percent of all waste from Pennsylvania's oil and gas drilling operations stays inside the state, according to a new study that tracks the disposal locations of liquid and solid waste from these operations across 26 years. Numerous human health hazards have been associated with waste from oil and gas extraction, including potential exposure to compounds known to cause cancer.

A powerful computational study of southern California seismic records has revealed detailed information about a plethora of previously undetected small earthquakes, giving a more precise picture about stress in the earth's crust.

Understanding the ecology and distributions of species in Amazonia is hampered by lack of information about environmental conditions, such as soils. Plant occurrence data are typically more abundant than soil samples in poorly known areas, and researchers from Finland and Brazil have now developed a method that uses both plant and soil data to produce a map of soil properties.

A new study begins to resolve the scale and pace of change during the first phases of animal domestication beyond the Fertile Crescent. To reconstruct this history, the authors turned to an unusual source: urine salts left behind by humans and animals.

Understanding how bacterial metacommunities homogenize could help scientists predict future changes to ecosystems.

Farmers can't predict their annual corn harvest with certainty, but with the help of new research from Michigan State University, they can now pinpoint specific parts of their fields that consistently produce either good or bad yields. Not only will this save them time and money; it will solve one of the most widespread environmental problems facing crop-producing regions -- nitrogen loss.

Researchers say mercury buried in ancient rock provides the strongest evidence yet that volcanoes caused the biggest mass extinction in the history of the Earth. The extinction 252 million years ago was so dramatic and widespread that scientists call it 'the Great Dying.' The catastrophe killed off more than 95 percent of life on Earth over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.