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Disturbing evidence is mounting that something frightening is happening deep under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—something far worse than the BP oil gusher. Warnings were raised as long as a year before the Deepwater Horizon disaster that the area of seabed chosen by the BP geologists might be unstable, or worse, inherently dangerous. What makes the location that Transocean chose potentially far riskier than other potential oil deposits located at other regions of the Gulf? It can be summed up with two words: methane gas.

Supplies of speciality metals like lithium, neodymium and indium could become restricted unless recycling rates improve. That's the message from the first two of six reports prepared to assess metal supply sustainability for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). 'Scientists should anticipate the possibility that they may not have the whole periodic table to work with in future,' says Thomas Graedel, who led the Global Metal Flows Working Group that compiled the studies.  The report series won't deliver overall supply and demand projections until nearer to the 2012 Rio Earth Summit. Nevertheless Graedel, who is also director of Yale University's Center for Industrial Ecology...

(Reuters) - An Icelandic volcano that caused air traffic chaos after erupting last month has gone dormant but it is too early to declare the eruption over, an official said Monday. Airlines across Europe stopped flying for days after the volcano under the Eyjafjallajakull glacier erupted in mid-April, spewing high levels of ash. Ash particles can cause serious damage if absorbed into airplane engines. Icelandic meteorological office geographer Sigthrudur Armannsdottir said the volcano, about 120 km southeast of the capital Reykjavik, was now showing only minimal signs of life. "There is no ash coming up and no lava," she told...

... As we have learned, these gases form an invisible barrier that, like a greenhouse's glass ceiling, keeps reflected heat of the sun from escaping our atmosphere. The denser that gaseous barrier grows, the hotter things get and the faster glaciers melt. As they flow off the land, we are warned, seas rise. Yet something else is lately worrying geologists: the likelihood that the Earth's crust, relieved of so much formidable weight of ice borne for many thousands of years, has begun to stretch and rebound.

Tooling around Panoramio, I found the Creux-du-Van in Switzerland, near Lac de Neuchatel. My first thought when looking at this was: "I'll bet they lost a lot of sheep on this thing." What's the Creux-du-Van? From Magic Places of Switzerland: Creux-du-Van And from Wikipedia: Creux-du-Van It's a cirque. And an impressive one. You can find it with "Creux-du-Van, Switzerland" on Google Maps. This is a good area for Swiss cheese, I believe. Click for full size. Click for full size. Click for full size. Click for full size.

As part of their battle to understand and protect against the destructive force of earthquakes, seismologists have gone to extraordinary lengths. They have bored holes deep into the earth's crust, laid out arrays of sensors hundreds of miles across, and built supercomputers capable of running simulations at teraflop speeds. But the most exciting new effort in cutting-edge seismology involves a piece of instrumentation that's a good deal less exotic. It's called an iPhone. "Each smartphone has an accelerometer built into it," says Robert W. Clayton, a professor of geology at Caltech. "It's primary function is to determine the orientation of...

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...

A new model of the Earth, 20 years in the making, describes a dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions. Created by University of Wisconsin-Madison geophysicist Chuck DeMets and longtime collaborators Richard Gordon of Rice University and Donald Argus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the model offers a precise description of the relative movements of 25 interlocking tectonic plates that account for 97 percent of the Earth's surface. "This model can be used to predict the movement of one plate relative to any other plate on the Earth's surface," explains DeMets. "Plate tectonics describes almost everything about how the Earth's surface...

, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings. The geothermal drill in Switzerland was shut down after it caused 100...

The eruption split a 1km chasm in the iceAn Icelandic volcano, dormant for 200 years, has erupted, ripping a 1km-long fissure in a field of ice.The volcano near Eyjafjallajoekull glacier began to erupt just after midnight, sending lava a hundred metres high.Icelandic airspace has been closed, flights diverted and roads closed. The eruption was about 120km (75 miles) east of the capital, Reykjavik. What volcanic scientists fear is the fact that this eruption could trigger an eruption of Katla, one of the most dangerous volcanic systems in the world.Eruptive events in Eyjafjallajökull are often followed by a Katla eruption. The...

When methane and freezing cold water fuse under tremendous pressure, they create a substance as paradoxical as it coveted: burning ice. Earlier in the year, a report from the National Research Council identified the combustible water, also known as methane hydrate, as a potential source of natural gas. Now, according to the Chinese news organization Xinhau, China is joining the US, Japan, and South Korea in the hunt for this weird mineral. Icy Hot : courtesy of NASAAs explained in this comic, there's 85.4 trillion cubic feet of methane hydrate buried under Alaska. That's equivalent to 3 billion tons of...

Pictures of widespread devastation leave no doubt: Last month's 8.8 magnitude earthquake in coastal Chile was extremely strong. Indeed, say NASA scientists, it might have shifted the axis of Earth itself. "According to our calculations, the quake moved Earth's figure axis by about 3 inches (8 cm)," says geophysicist Richard Gross of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. If the Earth tilted over 3 inches, you probably think you would have noticed. But that's not how the "figure axis" works. "The figure axis defines not how Earth is tilted, but rather how it is balanced," says Gross. Consider the...

Seismic shockers are to be expected, but planet seems to be more active. SNIP While the Chilean earthquake wasn't directly related to Japan's 7.0-magnitude temblor, the two have some factors in common. For one, any seismic waves that made their way from Japan to the Chilean coast could play a slight role in ground-shaking. "It is too far away for any direct triggering, and those distances also make the seismic waves as they would pass by from the Haiti or Japan events pretty small because of attenuation," Arrowsmith told LiveScience. (Attenuation is the decrease in energy with distance.) "Nevertheless, if...

Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 04:30:45 UTC Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 01:30:45 AM at epicenter Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones Location 29.725°N, 42.582°W Depth 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program Region NORTHERN MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE Distances 1605 km (1000 miles) WSW of Horta, Azores, Portugal 2685 km (1670 miles) ENE of SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico 3225 km (2000 miles) W of LISBON, Portugal Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 21.8 km (13.5 miles); depth fixed by location program Parameters NST= 42, Nph= 42, Dmin=>999 km, Rmss=1.22 sec, Gp=176°, M-type=body wave magnitude (Mb), Version=7 Source USGS NEIC (WDCS-D) Event...

The devastating magnitude 7.0 quake that ripped through Haiti Tuesday, reportedly killing thousands, did not catch everyone by surprise. In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University in Corvallis and co-author of a June 1989 article for Scientific American "Hidden Earthquakes," said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a "big one" that might occur in Haiti, due to the large fault near the capital city of Port-au-Prince—and the poverty-driven low level of earthquake-preparedness there. "If they have an earthquake on this fault...

The current treatment of young-age creationists in the scientific community and society at large is unfair and unwise. Scientists and philosophers of science, including old-age creationists and naturalists, should respect youngage creationists as legitimate contributors to science. Young-age creationists offer to the current origins science establishment a competing rational viewpoint that will augment fruitful scientific investigation through increased accountability for scientists, introduction of original hypotheses and general epistemic improvement...

Dr. Henry M. Morris founded the Institute for Creation Research in 1970 with a vision to uncover and present evidence for the accuracy and authority of the Bible. For almost 40 years, ICR has distinguished itself as the leader in creation science research and education, ably assisted by the many fine scientists whom God has led to work here. These men and women have dedicated their training and skills to raising the banner for the truth of our Creator God. We would like you to meet our current on-site scientists and hear their thoughts on the purpose, significance, and importance...

Seismic experiment gives best evidence yet for mantle plumes. Geologists have obtained the best image yet of a plume of hot rock that rises from Earth's deep mantle and fuels the volcanoes of the Hawaiian islands. The study, led by geophysicist Cecily Wolfe at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, reveals the structure of the plume down to at least 1,500 kilometres. Critics have questioned in recent years whether such plumes even exist. "This is a spectacular experiment that succeeded in getting data for putting the plume theory to the test," says Wolfe. The results are published this...

Evolutionists retreating from the arena of science --snip-- Today, the Darwinian scientific consensus persists within almost every large university and governmental institution. But around the middle of the 20th century an interesting new trend emerged and has since become increasingly established. Evolutionary theorists have been forced, step by step, to steadily retreat from the evidence in the field. Some of the evidences mentioned earlier in this article were demonstrated to be frauds and hoaxes. Other discoveries have been a blow to the straightforward expectations and predictions of evolutionists. Increasingly, they have been forced to tack ad hoc mechanisms onto Darwin’s...

Dec 2, 2009 — Field geologists have revisited a site Darwin visited on the voyage of the Beagle, and found that he incorrectly interpreted what he found.  A large field of erratic boulders in Tierra del Fuego that have become known as “Darwin’s Boulders” were deposited by a completely different process than he thought.  The modern team, publishing in the Geological Society of America’s December issue of the GSA Today,1 noted that “Darwin’s thinking was profoundly influenced by Lyell’s obsession with large-scale, slow, vertical movements of the crust, especially as manifested in his theory of submergence and ice rafting to...