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Cross-section of the Earth’s interior: crust, upper- and lower-mantle, and outer- and inner-cores. Credit: Mikio Fukuhara, Alexander Yoshino, and Nobuhisa Fujima ========================================================================= Rather than being created solely during supernova explosions, chemical elements could also be produced deep within the Earth’s lower mantle. It has long been theorized that hydrogen, helium, and lithium were the only chemical elements in existence during the Big Bang when the universe formed, and that supernova explosions, stars exploding at the end of their lifetime, are responsible for transmuting these elements into heavier ones and distributing them throughout our universe. Researchers in Japan and Canada are...

Plutonium is generally thought of as an artificial element created by humans, primarily to make the pits of nuclear weapons, but naturally occurring plutonium can be found in ancient rocks. Plutonium 244 is the longest lived isotope of Plutonium, but it's not easy to make, and finding this specific isotope in interstellar dust grains laid down on the ocean floors tells us important things about the formation of the elements that make up the Earth.Based on this paper:60Fe and 244Pu deposited on Earth constrain the r-process yields of recent nearby supernovae A. Wallner et al

If you're planning to go to the 2014 Annual Fall Meeting of the American Physical Society in Illinois this Saturday, you might be in for a bit of a surprise with the final talk of the day. Because that's when plasma physicist Dr John Brandenburg will present his theory that an ancient civilisation on Mars was wiped out by a nuclear attack from another alien race. In his bizarre theory, Dr Brandenburg says ancient Martians known as Cydonians and Utopians were massacred in the attack - and evidence of the genocide can still be seen today. Back in 2011 the...

Uranium is the element having 92 protons in its nucleus with typically 146 neutrons. It is the largest naturally occurring element. Like naturally occurring Thorium, uranium is radioactive and eventually decays into radium and radon which are likewise radioactive. Both uranium and thorium decay through many series of radioactive elements until they eventually become lead. The process of radioactive decay follows a common yet generally unfamiliar law known as exponential decay. It is from this decay law that we get the term, "half-life". The way this works is that when you start with a fixed amount of a radioactive material,...

The link between volcanism and the formation of copper ore could lead to discovery of new copper deposits. Copper has been in use for 6,000 years and it shows no signs of slowing down. The average home has about a hundred pounds of it and we are going to have more people and homes, not fewer. Volcanoes may be the answer. A research team led by Professor Jon Blundy of University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, studied giant porphyry copper deposits of the variety that host 75 percent of the world's copper reserves. Copper forms in association with volcanoes...

Back when Wisconsin and western Russia once shared an address south of the equator, a violent collision in the asteroid belt blasted Earth with meteorites. The space rock smashup showered Earth with up to 100 times more meteorites than today's rate (a rock the size of a football field hits the planet about every 10,000 years). Yet, only a dozen or so impact craters have been found from the ancient bombardment 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Most are in North America, Sweden and western Russia. There are only about 185 known impact craters on Earth of any...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...

<p>Ship logs and pottery show how the geomagnetic field has changed.</p> <p>Old ship records of magnetic north have helped to unravel a record of our planet's field.</p> <p>While sailors plied the Seven Seas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, little did they know that their ships' logs would one day help scientists to reconstruct the history of the Earth's magnetic field.</p>

Scientists have proposed a radical new model for the make-up of the Earth's core. The study may explain a longstanding puzzle about the most inaccessible part of our planet. It suggests that differences between the east and west hemispheres of the core are explained by the way iron atoms pack together. ... Lying more than 5,000km beneath our feet, at the centre of the Earth, the core is beyond the reach of direct investigation. Broadly speaking, it consists of a solid sphere of metal sitting within a liquid outer core. The inner core started to solidify more than a billion...

Ultra high precision analyses of some of the oldest rock samples on Earth by researchers at the University of Bristol provides clear evidence that the planet's accessible reserves of precious metals are the result of a bombardment of meteorites more than 200 million years after the Earth was formed. The research is published today in Nature. During the formation of the Earth, molten iron sank to its centre to make the core. This took with it the vast majority of the planet's precious metals – such as gold and platinum. In fact, there are enough precious metals in the core...

Ultra high precision analyses of some of the oldest rock samples on Earth by researchers at the University of Bristol provides clear evidence that the planet's accessible reserves of precious metals are the result of a bombardment of meteorites more than 200 million years after Earth was formed. During the formation of Earth, molten iron sank to its centre to make the core. This took with it the vast majority of the planet's precious metals -- such as gold and platinum. In fact, there are enough precious metals in the core to cover the entire surface of Earth with a...

Martin Bizzarro of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues set out to determine the amount of iron in the early solar system. To do so, they measured nickel-60, a decay product of iron-60, in eight meteorites known to have formed at different times during the first 3 million years of the solar system. The meteorites that formed more than about a million years after the start of the solar system contain significantly more nickel-60 than do those that formed earlier, the team found. In a neighborhood of young stars, only a supernova could have produced iron-60, the parent of...

As if the inside story of our planet weren’t already the ultimate potboiler, a host of new findings has just turned the heat up past Stygian. Geologists have long known that Earth’s core, some 1,800 miles beneath our feet, is a dense, chemically doped ball of iron roughly the size of Mars and every bit as alien. It’s a place where pressures bear down with the weight of 3.5 million atmospheres, like 3.5 million skies falling at once on your head, and where temperatures reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit — as hot as the surface of the Sun. It’s a place...

1 The placebo effect DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away. This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects...

The world's only known natural nuclear reactor, which decommissioned itself over two billion years ago, could provide insights into how modern nuclear plants can operate more safely. The site, in Gabon, West Africa, ran for 150million years without blowing up, and storing its own waste in a safe manner. The reactor was a natural deposit of uranium. Today, and for the last two billion years, natural uranium will not undergo nuclear reactions, because it contains too little of the fissionable isotope, uranium-235 (U235). But in the distant past, U235 was more abundant, comprising 3% of the total amount - the...

Primordial NukesThe 2-billion-year-old tale of Earth's natural nuclear reactors Peter Weiss For more than a decade, Alexander P. Meshik has kept close tabs on a fleck of black rock no larger than an infant's fingernail. It's so unassuming that most people would sweep it into a dustpan without a second thought. Yet to Meshik, a nuclear physicist originally from Russia, this little scrap of mineral is a scientific gem. E. Roell The fleck, with its clues to believe-it-or-not geophysical events, emerged from the bowels of Earth decades ago. It was unearthed in the early 1970s at the Oklo uranium mine...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that variations in the long-term reversal rate of the Earth's magnetic field may be caused by changes in heat flow from the Earth's core into the base of the overlying mantle. The Earth is made up of a solid inner core, surrounded by a liquid outer core, in turn covered by a thicker or more viscous mantle, and ultimately by the solid crust beneath our feet.

Researchers Describe How Natural Nuclear Reactor Worked In Gabon The Oklo natural nuclear-reactor site in Gabon. St Louis MO (SPX) Nov 01, 2004 To operate a nuclear power plant like Three Mile Island, hundreds of highly trained employees must work in concert to generate power from safe fission, all the while containing dangerous nuclear wastes. On the other hand, it's been known for 30 years that Mother Nature once did nuclear chain reactions by her lonesome. Now, Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have analyzed the isotopic structure of noble gases produced in fission in a sample from the...

Truth is the pillar of civilization. The word 'truth' occurs 224 times in the King James Version of the Holy Bible; witnesses testifying in American courts and before the United States Congress must swear to tell the truth; and, laws and civil codes require truth in advertising and in business practices, to list just a few examples. The purpose of science is to discover the true nature of Earth and Universe and to convey that knowledge truthfully to people everywhere. Science gives birth to technology that makes our lives easier and better. Science improves our health and enables us to...

Nearly half of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside, according to a large international research collaboration that includes a Kansas State University physicist. Studying the physical properties of Earth can help astrobiologists understand the mechanisms that caused our planet to become habitable. In turn, this information can then be used to determine where and how to search for habitable worlds throughout the Universe. ...