News by Subject Earth Science

To geologists, the mantle is so much more than that. It's a region that lives somewhere between the cold of the crust and the bright heat of the core. It's where the ocean floor is born and where tectonic plates die. A new paper published today in Nature Geoscience paints an even more intricate picture of the mantle as a geochemically diverse mosaic, far different than the relatively uniform lavas that eventually reach the surface.

An enormous volcanic eruption on Iceland in 1783-84 did not cause an extreme summer heat wave in Europe. But, as Benjamin Franklin speculated, the eruption triggered an unusually cold winter, according to a Rutgers-led study. The study, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, will help improve predictions of how the climate will respond to future high-latitude volcanic eruptions.

A new analysis suggests that the moon is actively shrinking and producing moonquakes along thousands of cliffs called thrust faults spread over the moon's surface. The faults are likely the result of the moon's interior cooling and shrinking, causing the surface crust to shrivel and crack like a raisin's skin. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, combines data from NASA's Apollo and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions.

Carbon is transported from Earth's surface to the mantle where the oceanic crust subducts beneath continents. The efficiency of this transfer has profound implications for Earth's deep mantle and shallow crust, and the proportions of carbon being routed through this mechanism were previously poorly understood. An interdisciplinary team of scientists working in a volcanic region in Costa Rica has now measured that 90% of the carbon released during subduction is trapped within the crust.

Which of Earth's features were essential for the origin and sustenance of life? And how do scientists identify those features on other worlds? A team of investigators with array of expertise ranging from geochemistry to planetary science to astronomy published this week an essay in Science urging the research community to recognize the vital importance of a planet's interior dynamics in creating an environment that's hospitable for life.

When India slammed into Asia, the collision changed the configuration of the continents, the landscape, global climate and more. Now a team of Princeton University scientists has identified one more effect: the oxygen in the world's oceans increased, altering the conditions for life. They created an unprecedented nitrogen record destined to become one of the fundamental datasets for biogeochemical history of Earth.