Picky, pragmatic, and enigmatic — a tiny fossil found in Southwestern Virginia eluded classification for more than 514 million years. Now, Virginia Tech geoscientists have restored this unique organism into its evolutionary lineage.

How do volcanoes work? What happens beneath their surface? What causes the vibrations – known as tremor – that occur when magma or gases move upward through a volcano's conduits? Professor Dr. Miriam Christina Reiss, a volcano seismologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), and her team have located such tremor signals at the Oldoinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania. The findings provide new insights into how magma and gas are transported within the Earth and thus improve our understanding of volcanic dynamics.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, the researchers combined Eulerian and Lagrangian methods to more accurately quantify surface eddy meridional heat transport (EHT) induced by both the stirring and trapping effects of mesoscale eddies. They find that stirring-induced surface EHT is 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than trapping-induced EHT throughout most of the global ocean. These results demonstrate that the horizontal stirring effect of mesoscale eddies is the dominant mechanism of EHT.