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A map of Earth's gravity

There's a gravity 'hole' in the Indian Ocean and now we may know why

24 June 2023

Earth appears to have less mass beneath a certain part of the Indian Ocean compared with the rest of the planet. Plumes of magma at the location could explain why


Humans have pumped so much groundwater, we’ve shifted Earth’s axis

16 June 2023

Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth's poles drift by 80 centimetres


Dried-up lake may explain why California is 'overdue' major earthquake

7 June 2023

Pressure on the San Andreas fault from a now-dried lake could have been sufficient to trigger past major earthquakes in California. The lake’s disappearance could explain why there have been no such quakes for nearly 300 years


Why is China drilling a hole more than 10,000 metres deep?

2 June 2023

An oil company in China has started drilling a hole that would be the deepest in the country and among the deepest in the world


A well for hydrogen production in Geneva, Nebraska

World's first drilling project to seek natural hydrogen hits a snag

14 April 2023

A well in Nebraska is the first in the world to have been drilled in search of naturally occurring geologic hydrogen, but tests to determine how much of the gas it might supply are on hold because of a broken pump


The ice sheet near Pituffik, Greenland

Next 10,000 years of Greenland ice sheet could be decided this century

29 March 2023

Carbon emissions within the next 50 years could lead to a tipping point where large parts of the Greenland ice sheet melt over the next 10,000 years


Oxygen on early Earth may have come from quartz crushed by earthquakes

20 March 2023

Billions of years ago, crushed quartz reacting with water could have created the conditions needed for the evolution of the photosynthetic microbes responsible for most of the oxygen now in Earth’s atmosphere


Gold hydrogen: Is there a huge reserve of clean fuel in Earth's crust?

6 March 2023

Geologists think there may be vast natural stores of hidden hydrogen gas within Earth, but no one is sure how much there is or how much could be recovered for energy


The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone supervolcano contains twice as much melted rock as thought

1 December 2022

There is more melted rock under Yellowstone Caldera – a volcano in Wyoming – than was previously estimated, but that doesn’t change the likelihood of an eruption


This image is from a temporary thermal camera located on the north rim of Mauna Loa's summit caldera. The temperature scale is in degrees Celsius up to a maximum of 500 degrees (932 degrees Fahrenheit) for this camera model, and scales automatically based on the maximum and minimum temperatures on the caldera floor and not the whole frame, which sometimes results in the rim (bottom of image) looking saturated (white). Thick fume, image pixel size and other factors often result in image temperatures being lower than actual surface temperatures. https://www.usgs.gov/media/webcams/mtcam-mokuaweoweo-caldera-thermal-northwest-rim 28/11/22 05:00 local time

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano is erupting for the first time since 1984

28 November 2022

For the first time in nearly 40 years, the world’s largest active volcano is erupting in Hawaii, after weeks of increased activity at the caldera


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