Free Republic

Scientists analyzing a volcanic eruption at a mid-ocean ridge under the Pacific have come up with a somewhat contrarian explanation for what initiated it. Many scientists say undersea volcanism is triggered mainly by upwelling magma that reaches a critical pressure and forces its way up. The new study says the dominant force, at least in this case, was the seafloor itself -- basically that it ripped itself open, allowing the lava to spill out. The eruption took place on the East Pacific Rise, some 700 miles off Mexico. "Mid-ocean ridges are commonly viewed as seafloor volcanoes, operating like volcanoes on...

Since the 18th century, geologists have struggled to explain how big magma chambers form in Earth's crust. In particular, it has been difficult to explain where the surrounding rock goes when the magma intrudes. Now a team of researchers from Uppsala University and the Goethe University in Frankfurt have found the missing rocks -- and they look nothing like what they expected. Researchers have previously proposed that the roofs and walls of magma chamber were either melted and assimilated into the magma, or that they would sink to the bottom of the magma chamber. However, enough evidence for either of...

Tourists in Indonesia ignored instructions to flee an erupting volcano so they could continue taking photos, the country’s disaster agency has said. Mount Barujari, part of the Mount Rinjani National Park on the island of Lombok, erupted without warning last Tuesday, ejecting a column of ash two kilometres into the sky that subsequently delayed flights to and from nearby Bali. Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation Agency quickly moved to evacuate the 1,023 tourists, including 639 foreigners, that were in the park at the time. It claims, however, that many refused to leave the mountain, in some cases even hiding from officials, so...

As scientists continue finding evidence for life in the ocean more than 3 billion years ago, those ancient fossils pose a paradox. Organisms, including the single-celled bacteria living in the ocean at that early date, need a steady supply of phosphorus, but "it's very hard to account for this phosphorus unless it is eroding from the continents," says Aaron Satkoski, a scientist in the geoscience department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "So that makes it really hard to explain the fossils we see at this early era." Satkoski, who is first author of a new report on ocean chemistry from...

It has long puzzled scientists why, after 3 billion years of nothing more complex than algae, complex animals suddenly started to appear on Earth. Now, a team of researchers has put forward some of the strongest evidence yet to support the hypothesis that high levels of oxygen in the oceans were crucial for the emergence of skeletal animals 550 million years ago. The new study is the first to distinguish between bodies of water with low and high levels of oxygen. It shows that poorly oxygenated waters did not support the complex life that evolved immediately prior to the Cambrian...

Paleontologists have teamed up with a paleoartist to create a model which challenges everything you thought you knew about the typical dinosaur. Dr. Jacob Vinther ofa Psittacosaurus — nicknamed a "parrot-lizard" — is about the size of a turkey, has bristles on its tail and a birdlike beak. In other words, a bit weird, but also pretty cute. It's also quite likely that the animal had feathers and a horn on each cheek, the experts say. Quite aptly, Psittacosaurus belongs to the group ceratopsians, which basically means "horned faces" in Greek. It's the same group that contains Triceratops. The scientists...

A research team led by the University of Bristol has found magma build-up beneath Japan's Aira caldera and Sakurajima volcano may indicate a growing threat to Kagoshima city and its 600,000 inhabitants. Sakurajima is one of Japan's most active volcanoes with small, localised eruptions nearly every day, but the history of the volcano is even more ferocious. In 1914, a large explosive eruption killed 58 people and caused widespread flooding in the adjacent city of Kagoshima as the ground subsided due to the withdrawal of magma from the subsurface. Continued measurements of the ground movement since that eruption show that...

In an extraordinary find, a team of Australian researchers have uncovered the world's oldest fossils in a remote area of Greenland, capturing the earliest history of the planet and demonstrating that life on Earth emerged rapidly in the planet's early years. Led by the University of Wollongong's (UOW) Professor Allen Nutman, the team discovered 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolite fossils in the world's oldest sedimentary rocks, in the Isua Greenstone Belt along the edge of Greenland's icecap. The findings are outlined in a study published in Nature, with co-authors Associate Professor Vickie Bennett from The Australian National University (ANU), the University of New...

New fossil finds from China push back the origins of deep soils by 20 million years, new research has uncovered. This is a key part of the stepwise conquest of the land and transformation of the continents, researchers from the universities of Peking and Bristol have discovered. One of the greatest transitions in Earth history was the greening of the land. Up to 450 million years ago, there was no life outside water, and the land surface was a rocky landscape. Without plants there were no soils, and the rocky landscape eroded fast. Then the first tiny plants crept out...

Last year marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of what many consider the greatest geologic image ever produced: William Smith’s epic map, entitled “A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with Part of Scotland.” In striking color, scale and detail, the 1815 map laid bare the region’s bedrock — from tilted layers of slate and fossil-rich marls and sandstones to Carboniferous coal seams and granite plugs — as none had before. The bicentennial of the map’s publication was commemorated in several sessions and displays at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Baltimore...

A small but rare earthquake struck about 100 miles off Daytona Beach, Florida, in the Atlantic Ocean, reports the Associated Press. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the magnitude 3.7 earthquake struck around 4 p.m. Saturday. There are no reports of damage or that it was felt on land. ...The USGS says earthquakes of less than magnitude 5.4 rarely cause damage. There are about 930,000 such quakes recorded worldwide each year or about 2,500 per day. According to the Florida’s Department Environmental Protection, the sunshine state sits on a section of the North American Plate that is less active than...

Millions of years ago, a series of nearby supernovae sent radiation and debris raining down to Earth. The events left traces of radioactive iron-60 embedded in the sea floor and even on the Moon, and now, researchers are saying they may have had life-altering effects on the early inhabitants of our planet. At just hundreds of light-years away, two major stellar explosions may have spurred changes to the environment, and even increased the rates of cancer and mutation.

The top diagram shows the lobes of movement, uplift in red and subsidence in blue, found using GPS data, while the botom diagram shows the lobes predicted by an earthquake simulation model. Image by University of Hawaii, Manoa =============================================================================================== HONOLULU, June 20 (UPI) -- Analysis of GPS data has revealed new areas of motion around the San Andreas Fault System. Using data collected by the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory's GPS array, researchers identified 125-mile-wide "lobes" of uplift and subsidence. Over the last several years, the lobes, which straddle the fault line, have hosted a few millimeters of annual movement. Computer...

Reptiles rapidly invaded the seas soon after a global extinction wiped out most life on Earth, according to a new study led by University of California, Davis, researchers. Global climate change -- likely triggered by massive volcanic eruptions -- killed off more than 95 percent of all species about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. Land reptiles colonized the ocean in just 3.35 million years at the beginning of the Triassic, a speedy recovery in geologic time, the researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports. "Our results fit with the emerging view that the recovery...

An international team of scientists have found a potentially viable way to remove anthropogenic (caused or influenced by humans) carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere -- turn it into rock. The study, published in Science, has shown for the first time that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) can be permanently and rapidly locked away from the atmosphere, by injecting it into volcanic bedrock. The CO2 reacts with the surrounding rock, forming environmentally benign minerals. Measures to tackle the problem of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and resultant climate change are numerous. One approach is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), where...

Super-computer modelling of Earth's crust and upper-mantle suggests that ancient geologic events may have left deep 'scars' that can come to life to play a role in earthquakes, mountain formation, and other ongoing processes on our planet. This changes the widespread view that only interactions at the boundaries between continent-sized tectonic plates could be responsible for such events. A team of researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Aberdeen have created models indicating that former plate boundaries may stay hidden deep beneath the Earth's surface. These multi-million-year-old structures, situated at sites away from existing plate boundaries, may...

Last summer, a startling article appeared in The New Yorker magazine outlining what could happen to the Pacific Northwest in the event of a large earthquake resulting from a full rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. As recently as 1700, this convergent zone produced an earthquake estimated at magnitude 9. The article attracted a great deal of attention, especially among people who had never heard of the possibility that the heavily populated Pacific Northwest could, in a geologic moment, become “toast” — as someone quoted in the article put it. The San Francisco Bay Area also suffers from the unfortunate...

Gold output across the globe hit an all-time high in 2015, climbing 1.8 percent to 3,211 tonnes. Much of this growth was led by Mexico, whose output increased double digits (18 percent) from 112 tonnes in 2014 to 133 tonnes last year. Indonesia grew 20 percent, Kazakhstan 29 percent. This year, global production is expected to level out as project development budgets were slashed during the three-year gold bear market. But with gold prices rebounding, miners are in a good position to be much more profitable. Below, explore and discover the world’s top 10 gold producing mines.

Magma located under areas that include the Yellowstone region and the western margin of North and South America can erupt violently, spewing vast quantities of ash into the air, followed by slower flows of glassy, viscous magma. [A] new study by University of Wyoming researchers suggests scientists can go back to the past to study present-day solidified magma chambers where the erosion has removed overlying rock, exposing granite underpinnings. One such large granite body, the 2.62 billion-year-old Wyoming batholith, extends more than 125 miles across central Wyoming. University of Wyoming earth scientist Davin Bagdonas traversed the Granite, Shirley and Laramie...

Volcanic activity worldwide 1 Jun 2016: Colima volcano, Bromo, Semeru, Dukono, Turrialba, Nyiragongo...