Professor Wenhao Sun shows off dolomite from his personal rock collection. Sun studies crystal growth of minerals from a materials science perspective. By understanding how atoms come together to form natural minerals, he believes we can reveal fundamental mechanisms of crystal growth, which can be used to make functional materials more quickly and efficiently. Image credit: Marcin Szczepanski, Lead Multimedia Storyteller, Michigan Engineering.

‘Dolomite Problem’: 200-year-old geology mystery resolved

The mouth of the Mississippi River in south Louisiana. The delta of the Mississippi is sinking faster than local sea-level rise rates. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Major river deltas are sinking faster than sea-level rise

Bubbles trapped in ancient Antarctic ice.

New ice core studies expand histories of greenhouse gases and ocean...

Homo erectus crania from the Turkana Rift. Left: WT 15000, ‘Turkana Boy’ from West Turkana. Right: ER 3733 from East Turkana. Photo: John Rowan

Scientists just discovered Africa is closer to breaking apart than we...

The northern end of the Cascadia subduction zone, where the Juan de Fuca (JdF) and Explorer (Exp) plates slowly move beneath the North American plate, is gradually shutting down piece by piece, with small pieces of the plate breaking off while the remaining plate continues to subduct until the next tear occurs.

Earth is splitting open beneath the Pacific Northwest

San Andreas Fault

Twin threat: Cascadia and San Andreas faults may be seismically linked

Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators reported a 550 million-year-old sea sponge fossil, filling in a gap in the evolutionary family tree of one of the earliest animals. Photo by Spencer Coppage for Virginia Tech.

A rare fossil reveals that Earth’s earliest sponges were hiding in...

Reconstruction of Masripithecus moghraensis by Mauricio Antón. Credit: Copyrights belong to Professor Hesham Sallam

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the...

Decompression and cooling occur synchronously during thermal quench fragmentation. Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10317-w

Unraveling active magma by drilling in the heart of volcanoes

We know very little about the processes that lead to a re-eruption of supervolcanoes, such as the mostly underwater Kikai caldera in Japan, and are therefore ill-equipped to make predictions. Credit: Seama Nobukazu

Japan’s giant caldera volcano is refilling 7,300 years later

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