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Kimberlites are complex rocks that came to the Earth's surface from great depths. The picture shows a thin section of a carbonate-​rich kimberlite. (Photograph: David Swart / Messengers of the Mantle Exhibition)

Traces of life in the Earth’s deep mantle

Drone images of craters formed at Sheep Mountain. Credit: Kent Sundell, Casper College.

Secondary cratering on Earth: The Wyoming impact crater field

A series of earthquakes and aftershocks shook the Ridgecrest area in Southern California in 2019. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) using fiber-optic cables enables high-resolution subsurface imaging, which can explain the observed site amplification of earthquake shaking. Credit: Yang et al., 2022

Fiber-optic cables can produce high-resolution underground maps

Clay soil sticks together. Photo by Lynn Ketchum.

Like diamonds, clay soils are forever

Despite ESA’s GOCE mission ending over seven years ago, scientists continue to use this remarkable satellite’s gravity data to delve deep and unearth secrets about our planet. Recent research shows how scientists have combined GOCE data with measurements taken at the surface to generate a new model of Earth’s crust and upper mantle. This is the first time such a model has been created this way – and it is shedding new light on the processes of plate tectonics. The new model produced in ESA’s 3D Earth study shows for the first time how dissimilar the sub-lithospheric mantle is beneath different oceans, and provides insight as to how the morphology and spreading rates of mid-oceanic ridges may be connected with the deep chemical and thermal structure. Credit: ESA/Planetary Visions)

Researchers recreate deep-Earth conditions to see how iron copes with extreme...

The rising Earth from the perspective of the moon.

Radiocarbon is key to understanding Earth’s past

Some of the world’s oldest rubies linked to early life

Locations of earthquakes (red) and corresponding seismic stations (yellow pins). Credit: Butler and Tsuboi (2021).

Earth’s ‘solid’ inner core may contain both mushy and hard iron

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Geologists dig into Grand Canyon’s mysterious gap in time

A map of the World Ocean Floor. Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

Geologists take Earth’s inner temperature using erupted sea glass

Boriana Kalderon-Asael conducts field work at a Middle-Upper Ordovician outcrop near Reedsville, Penn. Credit: Ashleigh Hood

Earth’s climate life story, 3 billion years in the making

The Alum Shale, here an example of a coastal deposit, consists of quartz and potassium Feldspar clasts as well as conspicuous Pyrite crystals (here: white) embedded in a clayey matrix. Scanning electron micrograph (scale: lower image edge length corresponds to approx. 40 μm). Credit: Schulz, GFZ

A rock with many perspectives

The early Earth was hotter than it is today and this affected the strength of the crust and mantle.

The Earth has a pulse — a 27.5-million-year cycle of geological...

An artistic representation of the potentially habitable planet Kepler 422-b (left), compared with Earth (right). Credit: Ph03nix1986 / Wikimedia Commons

Earth-like biospheres on other planets may be rare

Zircons studied by the research team, photographed using cathodoluminescence, a technique that allowed the team to visualize the interiors of the crystals using a specialized scanning electron microscope. Dark circles on the zircons are the cavities left by the laser that was used to analyze the age and chemistry of the zircons.Scientists led by Michael Ackerson, a research geologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, provide new evidence that modern plate tectonics, a defining feature of Earth and its unique ability to support life, emerged roughly 3.6 billion years ago. The study, published May 14 in the journal Geochemical Perspective Letters, uses zircons, the oldest minerals ever found on Earth, to peer back into the planet's ancient past.The team tested more than 3,500 zircons, each just a couple of human hairs wide, by blasting them with a laser and then measuring their chemical composition with a mass spectrometer. These tests revealed the age and underlying chemistry of each zircon. Of the thousands tested, about 200 were fit for study due to the ravages of the billions of years these minerals endured since their creation. Credit: Michael Ackerson, Smithsonian.

Earth’s oldest minerals date onset of plate tectonics to 3.6 billion...

McGill Colloidal Au research team study a mineralized (gold-bearing) vein underground at the Brucejack mine. Credit: Duncan McLeish

Clues from soured milk reveal how gold veins form

The quantitative model used in the study explains the enigmatic melt degrees and layered structures observed in most cratons on Earth.

Where on Earth is all the water?

Karen Heeter overlooks Yellowstone from Republic Pass on a tree coring excursion in July 2018. Credit: Grant L. Harley

Yellowstone National Park is hotter than ever

This study site was used by researchers to examine a portion of the Oman–United Arab Emirates ophiolite’s metamorphic sole. Credit: Tyler Ambrose

A closer look at the creation of a metamorphic sole

The Earth has a layered internal structure with the crust, upper mantle, mantle transition zone, lower mantle, outer core, and inner core from the surface to the center. In the Earth’s formation stage at approximately 4.6 billion years ago, the heavy metal components were separated from silicates and sank in the magma ocean, and a core formed at the center of the Earth. In this core-mantle separation process, partitioning of noble gases between the core and mantle occurred. Credit: Taku Tsuchiya, Ehime University

A deep reservoir of primordial helium in the Earth

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