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Inside Yellowstone’s fiery heart: Researchers map volatile-rich cap, offering clues to future volcanic activity

The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park (Stock photo).
The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park (Stock photo).

Beneath the steaming geysers and bubbling mud pots of Yellowstone National Park lies one of the world’s most closely watched volcanic systems. Now a team of geoscientists has uncovered new evidence that sheds light on how this mighty system may behave in the future — and what might keep it from erupting. The findings were recently published in Nature.

A team of researchers from Rice University, University of New Mexico, University of Utah and the University of Texas at Dallas have discovered a sharp, volatile-rich cap just 3.8 kilometers beneath Yellowstone’s surface. This cap, made of magma, acts like a lid, helping to trap pressure and heat below it. Using innovative controlled-source seismic imaging and advanced computer models, their findings suggest that the Yellowstone magma reservoir is actively releasing gas while remaining in a stable state.

The research, led by Rice’s Chenglong Duan and Brandon Schmandt along with collaborators, provides new insight into how magma, volatiles and fluids move within Earth’s crust. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation.

“For decades, we’ve known there’s magma beneath Yellowstone, but the exact depth and structure of its upper boundary has been a big question,” said Schmandt, professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. “What we’ve found is that this reservoir hasn’t shut down — it’s been sitting there for a couple million years, but it’s still dynamic.”

Previous studies suggested the top of Yellowstone’s magma system could lie anywhere from 3 to 8 kilometers deep — an uncertainty that left geologists debating how the magma system today compares with conditions before prior eruptions.

That changed after Schmandt conducted a high-resolution seismic survey in the northeastern part of the caldera. A 53,000-pound vibroseis truck — typically used for oil and gas exploration — essentially generated tiny earthquakes to send seismic waves into the ground. These waves reflected off subsurface layers and were recorded at the surface, revealing a sharp boundary at about 3.8 km depth.

“The motivation behind my research is to advance structural seismic imaging beyond the limits of conventional travel-time methods,” said Duan, a postdoctoral research associate. “Using a wave-equation imaging technique I developed during my Ph.D. for irregular seismic data, we made one of the first super clear images of the top of the magma reservoir beneath Yellowstone caldera.”

“Seeing such a strong reflector at that depth was a surprise,” Schmandt said. “It tells us that something physically distinct is happening there — likely a buildup of partially molten rock interspersed with gas bubbles.”

To better understand what causes this signal, Duan and Schmandt modeled various rock, melt and volatile combinations. The best match they determined is a mixture of silicate melt and supercritical water bubbles within a porous rock matrix resulting in a volatile-rich cap with about 14% porosity, half of which is occupied by fluid bubbles.

As magma rises and decompresses in volcanic systems, gases like water and carbon dioxide exsolve from the melt, forming bubbles. In some cases, these bubbles can accumulate, increasing buoyancy and potentially driving explosive eruptions.

But present conditions at Yellowstone appear to tell a different story.

“Although we detected a volatile-rich layer, its bubble and melt contents are below the levels typically associated with imminent eruption,” Schmandt said. “Instead, it looks like the system is efficiently venting gas through cracks and channels between mineral crystals, which makes sense to me given Yellowstone’s abundant hydrothermal features emitting magmatic gases.”

Schmandt likened the system to “steady breathing” with bubbles rising and releasing through the porous rock — a natural pressure-release valve that lowers eruption risk.

Getting these results was anything but easy. The research team not only completed the field survey in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they also had to coordinate the project within a busy and carefully protected national park. This meant they could only operate the heavy vibroseis truck at night and only from designated roadside turnouts. More than 600 seismometers were temporarily deployed to record the vibroseis truck signals, then recovered a few weeks later. Collaboration with University of Utah professor Jamie Farrell, a Yellowstone geophysics expert and seismic network operator, was essential to making this unusual survey possible, Schmandt said.

Processing the data proved just as difficult. Yellowstone’s complex geology — known for scattering seismic waves — produced noisy data that were initially hard to interpret. But with persistence and many discussions with Schmandt, Duan said he kept going, refining his approach again and again until the numbers finally told a clear story.

“The challenge was that the raw data made it almost impossible to visualize any reflection signals,” Duan said. “We used the STA/LTA function to enhance coherent seismic reflections, and this was the first time we had innovatively applied STA/LTA data within the wave-equation imaging algorithm.”

Duan said that just like traversing the rocky landscape of Yellowstone, tenacity is key for navigating its mysteries underground.

“When you see noisy, challenging data, don’t give up,” Duan said. “After we realized the standard processing was not going to work, that’s when we got creative and adapted our approach.”

By identifying this sharp, volatile-rich cap beneath Yellowstone, Schmandt’s team has established a new benchmark for monitoring the volcano’s activity. Future research could attempt to detect any shifts in melt content or gas accumulation that may serve as early warning signs of unrest.

Beyond Yellowstone, the study offers broader insights into onshore subsurface imaging with potential applications not only for volcano monitoring but also for carbon storage, energy exploration and hazard assessment.

“Being able to image what’s happening underground is important for everything from geothermal energy to storing carbon dioxide,” Schmandt said. “This work shows that with creativity and perseverance, we can see through complicated data and reveal what’s happening beneath our feet.”

Reference:
Chenglong Duan, Wenkai Song, Brandon Schmandt, Jamie Farrell, David Lumley, Tobias Fischer, Lindsay Lowe Worthington, Fan-Chi Lin. A sharp volatile-rich cap to the Yellowstone magmatic system. Nature, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08775-9

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University. Original written by Alexandra Becker.

Crustal brines at an oceanic transform fault

A graphic showing the convective heat cycle (red arrows) that drives plate tectonic motion (black arrows) on Earth. Heat flows toward subduction zones through the uppermost mantle layer, the asthenosphere. A computer model from Rice University finds that the asthenosphere can locally drag plates along with it rather than acting exclusively as a brake on plate movements as had been widely believed. (Image courtesy of Surachit/Wikimedia Commons)
A graphic showing the convective heat cycle (red arrows) that drives plate tectonic motion (black arrows) on Earth. Heat flows toward subduction zones through the uppermost mantle layer, the asthenosphere. A computer model from Rice University finds that the asthenosphere can locally drag plates along with it rather than acting exclusively as a brake on plate movements as had been widely believed. (Image courtesy of Surachit/Wikimedia Commons)

Being a geophysicist can sometimes feel like being a detective — uncovering clues, and then building a case based on the evidence.

In a new article published in Science Advances, a collaborative team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), presents a never-before-seen image of an oceanic transform fault from electromagnetic (EM) data collected at the Gofar fault in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The National Science Foundation funded work reveals unexpected brine deposits beneath the seafloor near the fault, which could change the way we conceptualize oceanic transform faults.

The Gofar fault operates much like the San Andreas, in that two tectonic plates slide sideways past each other. Unlike the San Andreas, large earthquakes on this fault have been strangely predictable, with large ruptures occurring every five to six years. That predictability has made Gofar an ideal place to study earthquake mechanisms, with a variety of data collected at the fault, including a number of small earthquakes measured on ocean bottom seismographs.

In contrast to seismic data, EM measurements tell researchers how well a material can conduct electricity. This is useful because one of the models for why Gofar behaves as it does is related to differences in the amounts of seawater present in the seafloor: fluids influence how faults stick, slide, and slip, causing earthquakes of various magnitudes. The salt in seawater makes it conduct electricity well, far better than the surrounding rocks, and so EM data provide clues as to where seawater or other fluids are hiding beneath the seafloor.

Using state of the art instruments, the study’s authors were able to create a snapshot of the electrical properties beneath the Gofar fault. They expected that one portion of the fault would be slightly more conductive than its surroundings based on prior models of such faults. Instead, the team was surprised to find that extremely conductive blobs reside beneath the seafloor on one side of the fault but not the other. To make matters more perplexing, other geophysical data from the area did not reveal similar anomalies.

“It was shocking to see such a stark contrast across the fault,” said Christine Chesley, a WHOI postdoc in Geology & Geophysics, and lead author of the study. “The conductivity structure defied all of our expectations based on what we thought we knew about oceanic transform faults.”

Oceanic transform faults have historically been thought of as simple, predictable features. They represent the least well-studied of the three major plate boundaries, which include divergent boundaries, like East Africa, where plates move apart forming new crust; and convergent boundaries, like the Himalayas, where two plates collide and recycle crust. However, recent findings like this necessitate a new framework for understanding oceanic transform faults.

“Whenever we go out and make these kinds of EM measurements, we see the seafloor through a different lens, and it almost always changes our views on the processes that shape the earth,” explained Rob Evans, Senior Scientist at WHOI in Geology & Geophysics and co-author of the study.

Determining why the conductive blobs appeared in the EM data, but did not present as other kinds of geophysical anomalies, required some deductive reasoning.

“We needed a self-consistent mechanism that could help explain why these conductive masses are existing under only one side of the fault and where seismic velocities seem unaffected,” Chesley explained. “Something with conductivities this high isn’t normally seen beneath the seafloor, except where magma is involved.”

Working with these puzzle pieces, the authors realized that the conductive blobs required salt — a lot of salt — to account for their high conductivity values. This suggested the anomalies represented brine accumulations.

“And in order to create brines, you need a source of heat,” added Chesley. “We think this heat source is magma near the transform fault.”

The authors hypothesized that some magma is present on the side of the fault where the conductive blobs of brine are found. This would be a remarkable shift in our understanding of transform faults, which have generally not been considered to host magmatic or hydrothermal activity.

“We have this amazing image of this particular section of the Gofar fault, but we haven’t yet been able to see how it connects to the adjacent mid-ocean ridge. We are hopeful that additional project funding will support additional research,” said Evans.

The National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences supported this project.

The following institutions contributed to this research: University of Delaware; Boise State University; ‎Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego; Western Washington University; University of Texas Austin; MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering; University of Southern Maine; Columbia University; ‎University of New Hampshire.

Reference:
Christine Chesley, Rob Evans, Jessica M. Warren, Andrew C. Gase, Jacob Perez, Christopher Armerding, Hannah Brewer, Paige Koenig, Eric Attias, Bailey L. Fluegel, Jae-Deok Kim, Natalie Hummel, Katherine Enright, Emilia Topp-Johnson, Margaret S. Boettcher. Evidence for crustal brines and deep fluid infiltration in an oceanic transform fault. Science Advances, 2025; 11 (15) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu3661

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Sink or Swim: The fate of sinking tectonic plates depends on their ancient tectonic histories

Creative destruction: a thinner ocean plate sides under a continental plate, melting and recycling the ocean crust into the Earth’s interior and birthing volcanoes in this illustration of subduction, a consequence of modern plate tectonics. A new study reports evidence of a transition in multiple locations around the world, 3.8-3.6 billion years ago, from stable “protocrust” to pressures and processes that look a lot like modern subduction, suggesting a time when plates first got moving. Credit: Nikolas Midttun, CC-BY
Creative destruction: a thinner ocean plate sides under a continental plate, melting and recycling the ocean crust into the Earth’s interior and birthing volcanoes in this illustration of subduction, a consequence of modern plate tectonics.
A new study reports evidence of a transition in multiple locations around the world, 3.8-3.6 billion years ago, from stable “protocrust” to pressures and processes that look a lot like modern subduction, suggesting a time when plates first got moving.
Credit: Nikolas Midttun, CC-BY

Newly published research has revealed that compositional rock anomalies within oceanic plates caused by ancient tectonics influence the trajectory and speed of the plates as they plunge deep into Earth’s mantle.

Between depths of 410 and 660 kilometers lies the mantle transition zone (MTZ), a critical region acting as a gateway for materials entering Earth’s deeper mantle. Large distributions of basalt rock compositions within the MTZ can cause subducting plates — ones that slide beneath other — to slow and/or stagnate within this zone, instead of descending directly into the lower mantle. Although basalt reservoirs have previously been discovered in the MTZ, their origins have remained unclear.

An international team of seismologists led by the University of Southampton (and now at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) has provided evidence of an extremely thick MTZ, which can only be explained by a large basaltic rock composition, suggesting that, in certain regions, entire oceanic slabs — approximately 100 kilometers thick — can possess significant basaltic material.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, provide a greater understanding of plate subduction, which recycles surface materials and volatile elements deep into the Earth’s interior, sustaining long-term climate stability, atmospheric balance, and the habitability of our planet over billions of years.

This groundbreaking research is part of the VoiLA (Volatiles in the Lesser Antilles) project, in which the team deployed 34 seismometers on the ocean floor beneath the Lesser Antilles.

“This is the first large scale ocean bottom seismic experiment conducted at an Atlantic subduction zone,” said Dr. Catherine Rychert, formerly an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and currently at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “We were very surprised to find an unexpected and exceptionally thick — approximately 330 kilometers — mantle transition zone beneath the Antilles, which makes it one of the thickest transition zones observed worldwide. Although the Caribbean is well-known for its sunshine and beaches, it now has a new claim to fame in the world of plate tectonics.”

“It’s wild to think that in some ways tectonic plates have a ‘memory’ and that affects the way the plates drive mantle convection and mix material back into the Earth,” said Dr. Nick Harmon, formerly an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and currently at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

“It’s wild to think that in some ways tectonic plates have a ‘memory’ and that affects the way the plates drive mantle convection and mix material back into the Earth,” said Dr. Nick Harmon, formerly an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and currently at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Lead author, Dr. Xusong Yang, a former visiting scholar at the University of Southampton and currently at University of Miami, emphasized, “We cannot overlook the inherited compositional heterogeneity of subducting oceanic slabs. It may greatly influence their ultimate fate in Earth’s deep interior.”

Dr. Kate Rychert and Dr. Nick Harmon, formerly of the University of Southampton, Professor Saskia Goes from Imperial College London, and Professor Andreas Reitbrock from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, led the experiment. The experiment was funded by NERC (Natural Environment Research Council, UK) and the ERC (European Research Council).

Reference:
Xusong Yang, Yujiang Xie, Catherine A. Rychert, Nicholas Harmon, Saskia Goes, Andreas Rietbrock, Lloyd Lynch, Colin G. Macpherson, Jeroen Van Hunen, Jon Davidson, Marjorie Wilson, Robert Allen, Jenny Collier, Jamie J. Wilkinson, Timothy J. Henstock, John-Michael Kendall, Jonathan D. Blundy, Joan Latchman, Richard Robertson. Seismic imaging of a basaltic Lesser Antilles slab from ancient tectonics. Nature, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08754-0

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Early Earth’s first crust composition discovery rewrites geological timeline

Early Earth was bombarded by meteors which played a crucial role in disrupting and recycling Earth’s first crust.
Early Earth was bombarded by meteors which played a crucial role in disrupting and recycling Earth’s first crust.

Researchers have made a new discovery that changes our understanding of Earth’s early geological history, challenging beliefs about how our continents formed and when plate tectonics began.

A study published in Nature on 2 April reveals that Earth’s first crust, formed about 4.5 billion years ago, probably had chemical features remarkably like today’s continental crust.

This suggests the distinctive chemical signature of our continents was established at the very beginning of Earth’s history.

Professor Emeritus Simon Turner from the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Macquarie University led the study, which included researchers from elsewhere in Australia, the UK and France.

“This discovery has major implications for how we think about Earth’s earliest history,” says Professor Turner.

“Scientists have long thought that tectonic plates needed to dive beneath each other to create the chemical fingerprint we see in continents.

“Our research shows this fingerprint existed in Earth’s very first crust, the protocrust — meaning those theories need to be reconsidered,” says Professor Turner.

Rethinking early Earth formation

For decades, scientists have tried to identify when plate tectonics first began, marking the earliest evolution of life. The chemical signature of rocks formed in subduction zones (where one plate has slipped beneath another) is distinctive in its low quantity of the element Niobium.

Scientists thought finding the age of the earliest low-Niobium rocks was the key to identifying when plate tectonics first began; but while a series of research teams tried to track this down, the results from each study were remarkably inconsistent.

“I began to wonder if we were asking the right question,” says Professor Turner.

Together with collaborators across six universities, he created mathematical models simulating early Earth conditions when our planet’s core was forming and an ocean of molten rock covered the planet’s surface.

The team’s calculations showed the protocrust — Earth’s earliest crust formed during the Hadean eon (4.5-4.0 billion years ago) — would naturally develop the same chemical signatures found in today’s continents, without needing plate tectonics to create them.

Chemical clues to formation

The initial results from the model showed that under the reducing conditions of early Earth, the element niobium would become siderophilic, or attracted to metal, sinking through the global magma ocean into the Earth’s core.

“I realised there might be a connection between early core formation, high siderophile element patterns, and the infamous negative niobium anomaly observed in continental crust,” says Professor Turner.

The distinctive signature of the continental crust matched the probable signature of material extracted from the mantle after core formation but before meteorites bombarded early Earth — solving the mystery of why the chemical signature appears in nearly all continental rocks regardless of age.

Early Earth’s evolution

“Our research shows that the chemical signatures we see in continental crust were created in Earth’s earliest period — regardless of how the planet’s surface was behaving,” says Professor Turner.

“This early crust was reshaped and made richer in silica thanks to a combination of meteor impacts, chunks of crust peeling off, and the beginning of plate movements.”

The first crust likely broke into pieces that became thicker in some areas, forming the beginnings of continents.

As these pieces moved sideways, the molten magma between them created crust similar to what we find in ocean floors today.

Meteor impacts and plate tectonics

The heavy meteor bombardment during this early period caused extensive disruption and recycling of the crust.

Plate tectonics may have worked in fits and starts, triggered by meteor impacts until about 3.8 billion years ago, when meteor bombardment decreased dramatically as the early Solar System’s chaos gave way to more orderly orbits.

Plate tectonics then fell into a continuous, self-sustaining pattern.

“This discovery completely changes our understanding of Earth’s earliest geological processes,” says Professor Turner.

Reference:
Turner, S., Wood, B., Johnson, T. et al. Formation and composition of Earth’s Hadean protocrust. Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08719-3

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Macquarie University.

Are volcanoes behind the oxygen we breathe?

Biogeochemical cycles billions of years ago. A complex web of interactions between geological features including volcanoes, subsurface mantle, oceans and the atmosphere created the chemical mixture necessary for early life to oxygenate our atmosphere. ©2025 Watanabe et al. CC-BY-ND
Biogeochemical cycles billions of years ago. A complex web of interactions between geological features including volcanoes, subsurface mantle, oceans and the atmosphere created the chemical mixture necessary for early life to oxygenate our atmosphere. ©2025 Watanabe et al. CC-BY-ND

It is widely believed that Earth’s atmosphere has been rich in oxygen for about 2.5 billion years due to a relatively rapid increase in microorganisms capable of performing photosynthesis. Researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, provide a mechanism to explain precursor oxygenation events, or “whiffs,” which may have opened the door for this to occur. Their findings suggest volcanic activity altered conditions enough to accelerate oxygenation, and the whiffs are an indication of this taking place.

Take a deep breath. Do you ever think about the air entering your lungs? It’s mostly inert nitrogen, and the valuable oxygen our lives depend on only accounts for 21%. But this hasn’t always been the case; in fact, several mass extinction events correspond to times when this figure changed dramatically. And if you go back far enough, you’ll find that before about 3 billion years ago, there was hardly any oxygen at all. So what changed, and how did it happen?

The scientific consensus is that about 2.5 billion years ago, the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) took place, most likely due to a proliferation of microorganisms exploiting favorable conditions and facing little competition. They would have essentially converted the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into an oxygen-rich one, and following that came complex life, which favored this new abundance of oxygen. But it seems there were some precursor oxygenation events prior to the GOE that may indicate the exact nature and timing of changes in the conditions necessary for the GOE to begin.

“Activity of microorganisms in the ocean played a central role in the evolution of atmospheric oxygen. However, we think this would not have immediately led to atmospheric oxygenation because the amount of nutrients such as phosphate in the ocean at that time was limited, restricting activity of cyanobacteria, a group of bacteria capable of photosynthesis,” said Professor Eiichi Tajika from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of Tokyo. “It likely took some massive geological events to seed the oceans with nutrients, including the growth of the continents and, as we suggest in our paper, intense volcanic activity, which we know to have occurred.”

Tajika and his team used a numerical model to simulate key aspects of biological, geological and chemical changes during the late Archean eon (3.0-2.5 billion years ago) of Earth’s geologic history. They found that large-scale volcanic activity increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, thereby warming the climate, and increased nutrient supply to the ocean, thus feeding marine life, which in turn temporarily increased atmospheric oxygen. The increase in oxygen was not very steady, though, and came and went in bursts now known as whiffs.

“Understanding the whiffs is critical for constraining the timing of the emergence of photosynthetic microorganisms. The occurrences are inferred from concentrations of elements sensitive to atmospheric oxygen levels in the geologic record,” said visiting research associate Yasuto Watanabe. “The biggest challenge was to develop a numerical model that could simulate the complex, dynamic behavior of biogeochemical cycles under late Archean conditions. We built upon our shared experience with using similar models for other times and purposes, refining and coupling different components together to simulate the dynamic behavior of the late-Archean Earth system in the aftermath of the volatile volcanic events.”

Reference:
Yasuto Watanabe, Kazumi Ozaki, Mariko Harada, Hironao Matsumoto, Eiichi Tajika. Mechanistic links between intense volcanism and the transient oxygenation of the Archean atmosphere. Communications Earth & Environment, 2025; 6 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02090-x

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Tokyo.

World’s oldest impact crater found, rewriting Earth’s ancient history

Large conical shatter cones within the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia, provide visible proof of a meteorite impact 3.5 billion years ago. Credit: Chris Kirkland, Curtin University
Large conical shatter cones within the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia, provide visible proof of a meteorite impact 3.5 billion years ago. Credit: Chris Kirkland, Curtin University

Curtin University researchers have discovered the world’s oldest known meteorite impact crater, which could significantly redefine our understanding of the origins of life and how our planet was shaped.

The team from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) investigated rock layers in the North Pole Dome — an area of the Pilbara region of Western Australia — and found evidence of a major meteorite impact 3.5 billion years ago.

Study co-lead Professor Tim Johnson, from Curtin University, said the discovery significantly challenged previous assumptions about our planet’s ancient history.

“Before our discovery, the oldest impact crater was 2.2 billion years old, so this is by far the oldest known crater ever found on Earth,” Professor Johnson said.

Researchers discovered the crater thanks to ‘shatter cones’, distinctive rock formations only formed under the intense pressure of a meteorite strike.

The shatter cones at the site, about 40 kilometres west of Marble Bar in WA’s Pilbara region, were formed when a meteorite slammed into the area at more than 36,000km/h.

This would have been a major planetary event, resulting in a crater more than 100km wide that would have sent debris flying across the globe.

“We know large impacts were common in the early solar system from looking at the Moon,” Professor Johnson said.

“Until now, the absence of any truly ancient craters means they are largely ignored by geologists.

“This study provides a crucial piece of the puzzle of Earth’s impact history and suggests there may be many other ancient craters that could be discovered over time.”

Co-lead author Professor Chris Kirkland, also from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the discovery shed new light on how meteorites shaped Earth’s early environment.

“Uncovering this impact and finding more from the same time period could explain a lot about how life may have got started, as impact craters created environments friendly to microbial life such as hot water pools,” Professor Kirkland said.

“It also radically refines our understanding of crust formation: the tremendous amount of energy from this impact could have played a role in shaping early Earth’s crust by pushing one part of the Earth’s crust under another, or by forcing magma to rise from deep within the Earth’s mantle toward the surface.

“It may have even contributed to the formation of cratons, which are large, stable landmasses that became the foundation of continents.”

Reference:
Christopher L. Kirkland, Tim E. Johnson, Jonas Kaempf, Bruno V. Ribeiro, Andreas Zametzer, R. Hugh Smithies, Brad McDonald. A Paleoarchaean impact crater in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Nature Communications, 2025; 16 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57558-3

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Curtin University. Original written by Samuel Jeremic.

Earliest days of Earth’s formation

Artistic view of Earth’s interior during mantle solidification in the first hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history. Gravitational segregation of dense, iron-rich magma (in orange) likely formed a basal magma ocean atop the core, that can explain the present-day structure of the lower mantle.
Artistic view of Earth’s interior during mantle solidification in the first hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history. Gravitational segregation of dense, iron-rich magma (in orange) likely formed a basal magma ocean atop the core, that can explain the present-day structure of the lower mantle.

New research led by a York University professor sheds light on the earliest days of the earth’s formation and potentially calls into question some earlier assumptions in planetary science about the early years of rocky planets. Establishing a direct link between the Earth’s interior dynamics occurring within the first 100 million years of its history and its present-day structure, the work is one of the first in the field to combine fluid mechanics with chemistry to better understand the Earth’s early evolution.

“This study is the first to demonstrate, using a physical model, that the first-order features of Earth’s lower mantle structure were established four billion years ago, very soon after the planet came into existence,” says lead author Faculty of Science Assistant Professor Charles-Édouard Boukaré in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York.

The mantle is the rocky envelopment that surrounds the iron core of rocky planets. The structure and dynamics of the Earth’s lower mantle play a major role throughout Earth’s history as it dictates, among others, the cooling of the Earth’s core where the Earth’s magnetic field is generated.

Boukaré originally from France, worked with research colleagues from Paris on the paper, Solidification of Earth’s mantle led inevitably to a basal magma ocean, published today in Nature.

Boukaré says that while seismology, geodynamics, and petrology have helped answer many questions about the present-day thermochemical structure of Earth’s interior, a key question remained: how old are these structures, and how did they form? Trying to answer this, he says, is much like looking at a person in the form of an adult versus a child and understanding how the energetic conditions will not be the same.

“If you take kids, sometimes they do crazy things because they have a lot of energy, like planets when they are young. When we get older, we don’t do as many crazy things, because our activity or level of energy decreases. So, the dynamic is really different, but there are some things that we do when we are really young that might affect our entire life,” he says “It’s the same thing for planets. There are some aspects of the very early evolution of planets that we can actually see in their structure today.”

To better understand old planets, we must first learn how young planets behave.

Since simulations of the Earth’s mantle focus mostly on present-day solid-state conditions, Boukaré had to develop a novel model to explore the early days of Earth when the mantle was much hotter and substantially molten, work that he has been doing since his PhD.

Boukaré’s model is based on a multiphase flow approach that allows for capturing the dynamics of magma solidification at a planetary scale. Using his model, he studied how the early mantle transitioned from a molten to a solid state. Boukaré and his team were surprised to discover that most of the crystals formed at low pressure, which he says creates a very different chemical signature than what would be produced at depth in a high-pressure environment. This challenges the prevailing assumptions in planetary sciences in how rocky planets solidify.

“Until now, we assumed the geochemistry of the lower mantle was probably governed by high-pressure chemical reactions, and now it seems that we need to account also for their low-pressure counterparts.”

Boukare says this work could also help predict the behaviour of other planets down the line.

“If we know some kind of starting conditions, and we know the main processes of planetary evolution, we can predict how planets will evolve.”

Reference:
Charles-Édouard Boukaré, James Badro, Henri Samuel. Solidification of Earth’s mantle led inevitably to a basal magma ocean. Nature, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08701-z

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by York University. Original written by Emina Gamulin.

When birds lose the ability to fly, their bodies change faster than their feathers

Evan Saitta, the paper’s lead author, with an emperor penguin in the Field Museum’s bird collections.Photographer(s): Kate Golembiewski (c) Field Museum
Evan Saitta, the paper’s lead author, with an emperor penguin in the Field Museum’s bird collections.
Photographer(s): Kate Golembiewski (c) Field Museum

More than 99% of birds can fly. But that still leaves many species that evolved to be flightless, including penguins, ostriches, and kiwi birds. In a new study in the journal Evolution, researchers compared the feathers and bodies of different species of flightless birds and their closest relatives who can still fly. They were able to determine which features change first when birds evolve to be flightless, versus which traits take more time for evolution to alter. These findings help shed light on the evolution of complex traits that lose their original function, and could even help reveal which fossil birds were flightless.

All of the flightless birds alive today evolved from ancestors who could fly and later lost that ability. “Going from something that can’t fly to flying is quite the engineering challenge, but going from something that can fly to not flying is rather easy,” says Evan Saitta, a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the paper.

In general, there are two common reasons why birds evolve flightlessness. When birds land on an island where there aren’t predators (including mammals) that would hunt them or steal their eggs, they sometimes settle there and gradually adapt to living on the ground. Since they don’t experience evolutionary pressure to stay in flying form, they gradually lose some of the features of their skeletons and feathers that help them fly. Meanwhile, some birds’ bodies change when they evolve semi-aquatic lifestyles. Penguins, for instance, can’t fly, but they swim in a way that’s akin to “flying underwater.” Their feathers and skeletons have changed accordingly.

Saitta is a paleontologist who often studies non-avian dinosaurs (the branches of the dinosaur family tree that do not include modern birds). However, when he arrived at the Field Museum for a postdoctoral fellowship, he was struck by the Field’s collections of over half a million birds.

“I suddenly had access to all these modern birds, and it made me wonder, ‘What happens when a bird loses the ability to fly?'” says Saitta. “And because I’m not an ornithologist, I went in and measured as many features of as many different feathers as I could. So it was a highly exploratory study in that sense.”

Saitta examined the preserved skins of thirty species of flightless birds and their closest flighted relatives and measured a variety of the birds’ feathers, including the microscopic branching structures that make up feather plumage. He also examined specimens of other, more distantly related species to represent more of the bird family tree.

Previous research has revealed how long ago different species of flightless birds branched off from their flying relatives. The ancestors of ostriches, for example, lost the ability to fly much longer ago than the ancestors of a flightless South American duck called the Fuegian steamer. Saitta found that these species’ feathers are very different. “Ostriches have been flightless for so long that their feathers are no longer optimized for being aerodynamic,” says Saitta. As a result, their feathers have become so long and shaggy that they’re sometimes used in feather dusters and boas. But even though Fuegian streamers can no longer fly, they lost this ability relatively recently, and their feathers remain similar to those of their flying cousins.

Saitta says he was surprised by how long it seemed to take flightless birds to lose the feather features that would have helped them fly. It didn’t seem to make sense why a flightless species would “waste” energy growing a bunch of feathers optimized for an activity that it no longer did, or why feathers no longer required for flight wouldn’t be freed up to evolve into a wide variety of forms. However, Saitta says, his postdoctoral advisor, Field Museum research associate and former Field curator Peter Makovicky (now at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum), had another perspective.

“Pete pointed out that when trying to understand why a modern bird looks the way it does, you can’t just think about natural selection or relaxation thereof. You have to also consider developmental constraints,” says Saitta. “Feathers are complex structures that have a really well-defined developmental sequence that’s hard to change. And when birds lose flight, those feather features disappear in the opposite order that they first evolved.”

When bird embryos develop feathers, those feathers increase in complexity in the same general order that those feather features first evolved in dinosaurs. After losing the ability to fly, birds lose those feather features in the opposite order that they first evolved. It’s like remodeling a house — it’s faster and easier to change elements that went in last, like the wallpaper, than it is to tear down a load-bearing wall and rebuild it into something new.

Some more recently-evolved feather adaptations, like the asymmetry in the flight feathers that allows birds to fly, are easier to change, and thus disappear relatively quickly once birds no longer need to fly. But overall, the basic feather structure is like those load-bearing walls. It takes a lot of evolutionary time for the underlying development of a standard feather to be transformed into producing something like a plume-y ostrich feather.

Saitta and his colleagues also found that certain larger features changed relatively quickly once a lineage lost the ability to fly. “The first things to change when birds lose flight, possibly even before the flight feathers become symmetrical, is the proportion of their wings and their tails. We therefore see skeletal changes and also a change in overall body mass,” he says.

The reason behind this, says Saitta, may be the comparative “costs” to grow these features. When animals develop, it takes a lot more energy to grow bones than it does to grow feathers — so evolution “prioritizes” changing the skeleton before the majority of the feathers.

“Let’s say a bird species lands on an island where they are able to safely live on the ground and don’t need to fly anymore. The first things to go are going to be these big, expensive bones and muscles, but feathers are cheap, so there’s less active selection to change them,” says Saitta. It’s like how if you auto-paid your $1,500 monthly rent on an old apartment that you no longer live in, that would have a bigger effect on your bank account than forgetting to cancel a $5-a-month subscription. For newly flightless birds, maintaining a flight-friendly skeleton is a bigger unnecessary cost than keeping some of their old feathers around unaltered.

Insights from this research could help scientists trying to determine whether a fossil bird, or a feathered dinosaur that isn’t part of the bird family, was able to fly. “Flight didn’t evolve overnight, and flight, or at least gliding, was possibly lost many times in extinct species, just as in surviving bird lineages. Our paper helps show the order in which birds’ bodies reflect those changes,” says Saitta. “Unless you have a fossil whose ancestors, even older fossils, have been flightless for a very long time, you might not see too many changes in their feathers. You might first want to look for changes in body mass, the relative length of the wings. Those change first, and then you can perhaps see changes in the symmetry of the feathers.”

Saitta’s research corroborates previous studies that have shown that a bird’s flight feathers become more symmetric after flight loss. “The good news is that because I came at this question from a different angle, we got results that are very consistent with a lot of the previous research, but I think maybe a little bit broader than if I had approached the question with a more specific focus,” says Saitta.

Reference:
Evan T Saitta, Lilja Carden, Jonathan S Mitchell, Peter J Makovicky. Feather Evolution Following Flight Loss In Crown Group Birds: Relaxed Selection And Developmental Constraints. Evolution, 2025; DOI: 10.1093/evolut/qpaf020

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Field Museum.

Dozens of 3-toed dinosaurs leave their mark in Queensland

Detailed highlights of the rock sample at Biloela in Queensland.
Detailed highlights of the rock sample at Biloela in Queensland.

A University of Queensland researcher has confirmed a boulder at a regional school contains one of the highest concentrations of dinosaur footprints per square metre ever documented in Australia.

Dr Anthony Romilio from UQ’s Dinosaur Lab has identified 66 fossilised footprints left in the Callide Basin in Central Queensland during the Early Jurassic period, around 200 million years ago.

“The footprints are from 47 individual dinosaurs which passed across a patch of wet, white clay, possibly walking along or crossing a waterway,” Dr Romilio said.

“It’s an unprecedented snapshot of dinosaur abundance, movement and behaviour from a time when no fossilised dinosaur bones have been found in Australia.

“Each footprint has 3 toes, indicating they belong to the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus.

“These dinosaurs were small, with legs ranging from 15 — 50 cm in length and when they left these marks, they were travelling less than 6 km/hr.

“Evidence from skeletal fossils overseas tells us dinosaurs with feet like these were plant eaters with long legs, a chunky body, short arms, and a small head with a beak.”

The remarkable rock was uncovered 20 years ago at Callide Mine near Biloela and given to the local high school.

Its significance remained unknown until Dr Romilio’s previous work on nearby Mount Morgan footprints prompted the community to contact him.

“Significant fossils like this can sit unnoticed for years, even in plain sight,” Dr Romilio said.

“It’s incredible to think that a piece of history this rich was resting in a schoolyard all this time.

“With advanced 3D imaging and light filters, I was able to reveal hidden details in the footprints.

“Another sample in this study of Callide Basin footprints was also hiding in plain sight — I spotted it being used as a carpark entry delineator at Callide Mine.

“This rock is much larger at around 2-tonnes with 2 distinct footprints left by a slightly larger dinosaur walking on 2 legs around 80cm in length.

“Along with a sample from a third rock that is encased in resin and was being used as a bookend, we have gained new insight into the ancient past in this region.”

High-resolution models of the fossils are available online, allowing anyone to explore these ancient tracks in detail.

Investigation of the rock samples has been supported by Batchfire Resources, Biloela State High School and the Banana Shire Council.

Reference:
Anthony Romilio, Ron Park, Wes Nichols, Owen Jackson. Dinosaur footprints from the Lower Jurassic (Hettangian–Sinemurian) Precipice Sandstone of the Callide Basin, Queensland, Australia. Historical Biology, 2025; 1 DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2025.2472153

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Queensland.

From dinosaurs to birds: the origins of feather formation

At the 12th day of incubation, feather buds exhibit longitudinal domains of cell density that correspond to the barbs of the future down feather. © Rory Cooper & Michel Milinkovitch (CC BY)
At the 12th day of incubation, feather buds exhibit longitudinal domains of cell density that correspond to the barbs of the future down feather. © Rory Cooper & Michel Milinkovitch (CC BY)

Feathers, essential for thermoregulation, flight, and communication in birds, originate from simple appendages known as proto-feathers, which were present in certain dinosaurs.By studying embryonic development of the chicken, two researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have uncovered a key role of a molecular signalling pathway (the Shh pathway) in their formation. This research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, provides new insights into the morphogenetic mechanisms that led to feather diversification throughout evolution.

Feathers are among the most complex cutaneous appendages in the animal kingdom. While their evolutionary origin has been widely debated, paleontological discoveries and developmental biology studies suggest that feathers evolved from simple structures known as proto-feathers. These primitive structures, composed of a single tubular filament, emerged around 200 million years ago in certain dinosaurs. Paleontologists continue to discuss the possibility of their even earlier presence in the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs (the first flying vertebrates with membranous wings) around 240 million years ago.

Proto-feathers are simple, cylindrical filaments. They differ from modern feathers by the absence of barbs and barbules, and by the lack of a follicle — an invagination at their base. The emergence of proto-feathers likely marked the first key step in feather evolution, initially providing thermal insulation and ornamentation before being progressively modified under natural selection to give rise to the more complex structures that enabled flight.

The laboratory of Michel Milinkovitch, professor at the Department of Genetics and Evolution in the Faculty of Science at UNIGE, studies the role of molecular signaling pathways (communication systems that transmit messages within and between cells), such as the Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) pathway, in the embryonic development of scales, hair, and feathers in modern vertebrates. In a previous study, the Swiss scientists stimulated the Shh pathway by injecting an activating molecule into the blood vessels of chicken embryos and observed the complete and permanent transformation of scales into feathers on the bird’s feet.

Recreating the first dinosaur proto-feathers

”Since the Shh pathway plays a crucial role in feather development, we wanted to observe what happens when it is inhibited,” explains Rory Cooper, a postdoctoral researcher in Michel Milinkovitch’s lab and co-author of the study. By injecting a molecule that blocks the Shh signaling pathway on the 9th day of embryonic development — just before feather buds appear on the wings — the two researchers observed the formation of unbranched and non-invaginated buds, resembling the putative early stages of proto-feathers.

However, from the 14th day of embryonic development, feather morphogenesis partially recovered. Furthermore, although the chicks hatched with patches of naked skin, dormant subcutaneous follicles were autonomously reactivated, eventually producing chickens with normal plumage.

”Our experiments show that while a transient disturbance in the development of foot scales can permanently turn them into feathers, it is much harder to permanently disrupt feather development itself,” concludes Michel Milinkovitch. ”Clearly, over the course of evolution, the network of interacting genes has become extremely robust, ensuring the proper development offeathers even under substantial genetic or environmental perturbations. The big challenge now is to understand how genetic interactions evolve to allow for the emergence of morphological novelties such as proto-feathers.”

Reference:
Rory L. Cooper, Michel C. Milinkovitch. In vivo sonic hedgehog pathway antagonism temporarily results in ancestral proto-feather-like structures in the chicken. PLOS Biology, 2025; 23 (3): e3003061 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003061

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Université de Genève.

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Dryolestes, a Late Jurassic relative of the Cretaceous therians. Credit: Artist James Brown, courtesy of Pamela Gill
Dryolestes, a Late Jurassic relative of the Cretaceous therians. Credit: Artist James Brown, courtesy of Pamela Gill

More mammals were living on the ground several million years before the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, new research led by the University of Bristol has revealed.

The study, published today in the journal Palaeontology, provides fresh evidence that many mammals were already shifting toward a more ground-based lifestyle leading up to the asteroid’s impact.

By analysing small-fossilised bone fragments, specifically end of limb bones, from marsupial and placental mammals found in Western North America — the only place with a well-preserved terrestrial fossil record from this time — the team discovered signs that these mammals were adapting to life on the ground.

End of limb bones were analysed as they bear signatures of locomotory habit that can be statistically compared with modern mammals.

Lead author Professor Christine Janis from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences said: “It was already known that plant life changed toward the end of the Cretaceous, with flowering plants, known as angiosperms, creating more diverse habitats on the ground. We also knew that tree dwelling mammals struggled after the asteroid impact. What had not been documented, was whether mammals were becoming more terrestrial, in line with the habitat changes.”

While previous studies used complete skeletons to study ancient mammal movement, this research is one of the first to use small bone elements to track changes within an entire community.

The team have used statistical data from museum collections in New York, California, and Calgary to analyse these tiny fossils.

Professor Janis added: “The vegetational habitat was more important for the course of Cretaceous mammalian evolution than any influence from dinosaurs.”

The evidence was gathered from bone articular fragments of therian mammals, which includes marsupials and placentals.

The team’s methods were not applied to more basal mammals such as multiberculates, which were common at the time, because their bones were different.

Professor Janis said: “We’ve known for a long time that mammalian long bone articular surfaces can carry good information about their mode of locomotion, but I think this is the first study to use such small bone elements to study change within a community, rather than just individual species.”

While this research marks the end of the project, the findings offer new insights into how prehistoric mammals responded to changing environments — a few million years before the asteroid impact reshaped life on Earth.

Reference:
Christine M. Janis, Alberto Martín-Serra, Jessica M. Theodor, Craig S. Scott. Down to earth: therian mammals became more terrestrial towards the end of the Cretaceous. Palaeontology, 2025 DOI: 10.1111/pala.70004

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Bristol.

Rare pterosaur fossil reveals crocodilian bite 76m years ago

The juvenile vertebra of the pterosaur is seen in comparison to an adult-sized one. The bite occurred some 76 million years agoCredit: University of Reading
The juvenile vertebra of the pterosaur is seen in comparison to an adult-sized one. The bite occurred some 76 million years ago
Credit: University of Reading

The fossilised neck bone of a flying reptile unearthed in Canada shows tell-tale signs of being bitten by a crocodile-like creature 76 million years ago, according to a new study published today [23 January] in the Journal of Palaeontology.

The juvenile pterosaur vertebra, discovered in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, bears a circular four-millimetre-wide puncture mark from a crocodilian tooth.

Researchers from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (Canada), the University of Reading (UK) and the University of New England (Australia) say this rare evidence provides insight into predator-prey dynamics in the region during the Cretaceous Period.

The discovery was made during an international field course that took place in July 2023, led by Dr Brian Pickles from the University of Reading.

Dr Caleb Brown from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is the lead author of the paper.

He said: “Pterosaur bones are very delicate — so finding fossils where another animal has clearly taken a bite is exceptionally uncommon. This specimen being a juvenile makes it even more rare.”

Dinosaur Provincial Park has produced some of the most important dinosaur fossil discoveries ever made.

The punctured vertebra belongs to a young Azhdarchid pterosaur (Cryodrakon boreas), with an estimated wingspan of two metres.

Adults of this species would have been as tall as a giraffe with a wingspan in the region of 10m.

The researchers used micro-CT scans and comparisons with other pterosaur bones to confirm the puncture is not a result of damage during fossilisation or excavation, but an actual bite.

Dr Brian Pickles from the University of Reading and co-author of the paper said: “Bite traces help to document species interactions from this period. We can’t say if the pterosaur was alive or dead when it was bitten but the specimen shows that crocodilians occasionally preyed on, or scavenged, juvenile pterosaurs in prehistoric Alberta over 70 million years ago.”

The paper also shows that this new bone documents the first evidence in North America of ancient crocodilians opportunistically feeding on these giant prehistoric flying reptiles. Other examples of Azhdarchid bones with possible crocodilian bites have previously been found in Romania.

Reference:
Caleb M. Brown, Phil R. Bell, Holly Owers, Brian J. Pickles. A juvenile pterosaur vertebra with putative crocodilian bite from the Campanian of Alberta, Canada. Journal of Paleontology, 2025; 1 DOI: 10.1017/jpa.2024.12

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Reading.

New twist in mystery of dinosaurs’ origin

An artist’s illustration of Nyasasaurus, which could be the earliest known dinosaur, or else a close relative of early dinosaurs. Credit: Mark Witton/The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
An artist’s illustration of Nyasasaurus, which could be the earliest known dinosaur, or else a close relative of early dinosaurs. Credit: Mark Witton/The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

The remains of the earliest dinosaurs may lie undiscovered in the Amazon and other equatorial regions of South America and Africa, suggests a new study led by UCL (University College London) researchers.

Currently, the oldest known dinosaur fossils date back about 230 million years and were unearthed further south in places including Brazil, Argentina and Zimbabwe. But the differences between these fossils suggest dinosaurs had already been evolving for some time, pointing to an origin millions of years earlier.

The new study, published in the journal Current Biology, accounted for gaps in the fossil record and concluded that the earliest dinosaurs likely emerged in a hot equatorial region in what was then the supercontinent Gondwana — an area of land that encompasses the Amazon, Congo basin, and Sahara Desert today.

Lead author and PhD student Joel Heath (UCL Earth Sciences and the Natural History Museum, London) said: “Dinosaurs are well studied but we still don’t really know where they came from. The fossil record has such large gaps that it can’t be taken at face value.

“Our modelling suggests that the earliest dinosaurs might have originated in western, low-latitude Gondwana. This is a hotter and drier environment than previously thought, made up of desert- and savannah-like areas.

“So far, no dinosaur fossils have been found in the regions of Africa and South America that once formed this part of Gondwana. However, this might be because researchers haven’t stumbled across the right rocks yet, due to a mix of inaccessibility and a relative lack of research efforts in these areas.”

The modelling study drew on fossils and evolutionary trees of dinosaurs and their close reptile relatives, as well as the geography of the period. It accounted for gaps in the fossil record by treating areas of the globe where no fossils had been found as missing information rather than areas where no fossils exist.

Initially, early dinosaurs were vastly outnumbered by their reptile cousins.

These included the ancestors of crocodiles, the pseudosuchians (an abundant group including enormous species up to 10 metres long), and pterosaurs, the first animals to evolve powered flight (flying by flapping wings rather than gliding), who grew as big as fighter jets.

By contrast, the earliest dinosaurs were much smaller than their descendants — more the size of a chicken or dog than a Diplodocus. They walked on two legs (were bipedal) and most are thought to have been omnivores.

Dinosaurs became dominant after volcanic eruptions wiped out many of their reptile relatives 201 million years ago.

The new modelling results suggested that dinosaurs as well as other reptiles may have originated in low-latitude Gondwana, before radiating outwards, spreading to southern Gondwana and to Laurasia, the adjacent northern supercontinent that later split into Europe, Asia and North America.

Support for this origin comes from the fact it is a midpoint between where the earliest dinosaurs have been found in southern Gondwana and where the fossils of many of their close relatives have been discovered to the north in Laurasia.

As there is uncertainty about how the most ancient dinosaurs were related to one another and to their close relatives, the researchers ran their model on three proposed evolutionary trees.

They found strongest support for a low-latitude Gondwanan origin of the dinosaurs in the model that counted silesaurids, traditionally regarded as cousins of dinosaurs but not dinosaurs themselves, as ancestors of ornithischian dinosaurs.

Ornithischians, one of the three main dinosaur groups that later included plant eaters Stegosaurus and Triceratops, are mysteriously absent from the fossil record of these early years of the dinosaur era. If silesaurids are the ancestors of ornithischians, this helps to fill in this gap in the evolutionary tree.

Senior author Professor Philip Mannion (UCL Earth Sciences) said: “Our results suggest early dinosaurs may have been well adapted to hot and arid environments. Out of the three main dinosaur groups, one group, sauropods, which includes the Brontosaurus and the Diplodocus, seemed to retain their preference for a warm climate, keeping to Earth’s lower latitudes.

“Evidence suggests the other two groups, theropods and ornithischians, may have developed the ability to generate their own body heat some millions of years later in the Jurassic period, allowing them to thrive in colder regions, including the poles.”

The earliest known dinosaurs include Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Coelophysis, and Eodromaeus.

Reference:
Joel A. Heath, Natalie Cooper, Paul Upchurch, Philip D. Mannion. Accounting for sampling heterogeneity suggests a low paleolatitude origin for dinosaurs. Current Biology, 2025; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.053

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University College London.

Dinosaurs roamed the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to new analysis of the oldest North American fossils

An artist’s rendering shows how Ahvaytum bahndooiveche may have appeared in a habitat dating to around 230 million years ago. Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto
An artist’s rendering shows how Ahvaytum bahndooiveche may have appeared in a habitat dating to around 230 million years ago. Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto

How and when did dinosaurs first emerge and spread across the planet more than 200 million years ago? That question has for decades been a source of debate among paleontologists faced with fragmented fossil records. The mainstream view has held that the reptiles emerged on the southern portion of the ancient supercontinent Pangea called Gondwana millions of years before spreading to the northern half named Laurasia.

But now, a newly described dinosaur whose fossils were uncovered by University of Wisconsin-Madison paleontologists is challenging that narrative, with evidence that the reptiles were present in the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously known.

The UW-Madison team has been analyzing the fossil remains since they were first discovered in 2013 in present-day Wyoming, an area that was near the equator on Laurasia. The creature, named Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, is now the oldest known Laurasian dinosaur, and with fossils estimated to be around 230 million years old, it’s comparable in age to the earliest known Gondwanan dinosaurs.

UW-Madison scientists and their research partners detail their discovery Jan. 8, 2025, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

“We have, with these fossils, the oldest equatorial dinosaur in the world — it’s also North America’s oldest dinosaur,” says Dave Lovelace, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum who co-led the work with graduate student Aaron Kufner.

Discovered in a layer of rock known as the Popo Agie Formation, it took years of careful work by Lovelace and his colleagues to analyze the fossils, establish them as a new dinosaur species and determine their estimated age.

While the team doesn’t have a complete specimen — that’s an exceedingly rare occurrence for early dinosaurs — they did find enough fossils, particularly parts of the species’ legs, to positively identify Ahvaytum bahndooiveche as a dinosaur, and likely as a very early sauropod relative. Sauropods were a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that included some famously gigantic species like those in the aptly named group of titanosaurs. The distantly related Ahvaytum bahndooiveche lived millions of years earlier and was smaller — much smaller.

“It was basically the size of a chicken but with a really long tail,” says Lovelace. “We think of dinosaurs as these giant behemoths, but they didn’t start out that way.”

Indeed, the type specimen of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, which was full-grown but could have been slightly bigger at its maximum age, stood a little over one foot tall and was around three feet long from head to tail. Although scientists haven’t found its skull material, which could help illuminate what it ate, other closely related early sauropod-line dinosaurs were eating meat and would likely have been omnivorous.

The researchers found the few known bones of Ahvaytum in a layer of rock just a little bit above those of a newly described amphibian that they also discovered. The evidence suggests that Ahvaytum bahndooiveche lived in Laurasia during or soon after a period of immense climatic change known as the Carnian pluvial episode that has previously been connected to an early period of diversification of dinosaur species.

The climate during that period, lasting from about 234 to 232 million years ago, was much wetter than it had been previously, transforming large, hot stretches of desert into more hospitable habitats for early dinosaurs.

Lovelace and his colleagues performed high-precision radioisotopic dating of rocks in the formation that held Ahvaytum’s fossils, which revealed that the dinosaur was present in the northern hemisphere around 230 million years ago. The researchers also found an early dinosaur-like track in slightly older rocks, demonstrating that dinosaurs or their cousins were already in the region a few million years prior to Ahvaytum.

“We’re kind of filling in some of this story, and we’re showing that the ideas that we’ve held for so long — ideas that were supported by the fragmented evidence that we had — weren’t quite right,” Lovelace says. “We now have this piece of evidence that shows dinosaurs were here in the northern hemisphere much earlier than we thought.”

While the scientific team is confident they’ve discovered North America’s oldest dinosaur, it’s also the first dinosaur species to be named in the language of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, whose ancestral lands include the site where the fossils were found. Eastern Shoshone tribal elders and middle school students were integral to the naming process. Ahvaytum bahndooiveche broadly translates to “long ago dinosaur” in the Shoshone language.

Several tribal members also partnered with Lovelace and his UW-Madison colleagues as the researchers sought to evolve their field practices and better respect the land by incorporating the knowledge and perspectives of the Indigenous peoples into their work.

“The continuous relationship developed between Dr. Lovelace, his team, our school district, and our community is one of the most important outcomes of the discovery and naming of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche,” says Amanda LeClair-Diaz, a co-author on the paper and a member of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes. LeClair-Diaz is the Indian education coordinator at Fort Washakie school and coordinated the naming process with students and tribal elders — a process that started under her predecessor, Lynette St. Clair.

“Typically, the research process in communities, especially Indigenous communities, has been one sided, with the researchers fully benefiting from studies,” says LeClair-Diaz. “The work we have done with Dr. Lovelace breaks this cycle and creates an opportunity for reciprocity in the research process.”

Reference:
David Lovelace et al. Rethinking dinosaur origins: oldest known equatorial dinosaur-bearing assemblage (mid-late Carnian Popo Agie FM, Wyoming, USA). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2025 DOI: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlae153

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison. Original written by Will Cushman

Earth’s inner core is undergoing a transformation

The near surface of the inner core may be changing. (USC Graphic/Edward Sotelo)
The near surface of the inner core may be changing. (USC Graphic/Edward Sotelo)

The surface of the Earth’s inner core may be changing, as shown by a new study from USC scientists that detected structural changes near the planet’s center, published today in Nature Geoscience.

The changes of the inner core has long been a topic of debate for scientists. However, most research has been focused on assessing rotation. John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study, said the researchers “didn’t set out to define the physical nature of the inner core.”

“What we ended up discovering is evidence that the near surface of Earth’s inner core undergoes structural change,” Vidale said. The finding sheds light on the role topographical activity plays in rotational changes in the inner core that have minutely altered the length of a day and may relate to the ongoing slowing of the inner core.

Redefining the inner core

Located 3,000 miles below the Earth’s surface, the inner core is anchored by gravity within the molten liquid outer core. Until now the inner core was widely thought of as a solid sphere.

The original aim of the USC scientists was to further chart the slowing of the inner core. “But as I was analyzing multiple decades’ worth of seismograms, one dataset of seismic waves curiously stood out from the rest,” Vidale said. “Later on, I’d realize I was staring at evidence the inner core is not solid.”

The study utilized seismic waveform data — including 121 repeating earthquakes from 42 locations near Antarctica’s South Sandwich Islands that occurred between 1991 and 2024 — to give a glimpse of what takes place in the inner core. As the researchers analyzed the waveforms from receiver-array stations located near Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Canada, one dataset of seismic waves from the latter station included uncharacteristic properties the team had never seen before.

“At first the dataset confounded me,” Vidale said. It wasn’t until his research team improved the resolution technique did it become clear the seismic waveforms represented additional physical activity of the inner core.

Deformed inner core

The physical activity is best explained as temporal changes in the shape of the inner core. The new study indicates that the near surface of the inner core may undergo viscous deformation, changing its shape and shifting at the inner core’s shallow boundary.

The clearest cause of the structural change is interaction between the inner and outer core. “The molten outer core is widely known to be turbulent, but its turbulence had not been observed to disrupt its neighbor the inner core on a human timescale,” Vidale said. “What we’re observing in this study for the first time is likely the outer core disturbing the inner core.”

Vidale said the discovery opens a door to reveal previously hidden dynamics deep within Earth’s core, and may lead to better understanding of Earth’s thermal and magnetic field.

Reference:
John E. Vidale, Wei Wang, Ruoyan Wang, Guanning Pang, Keith Koper. Annual-scale variability in both the rotation rate and near surface of Earth’s inner core. Nature Geoscience, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01642-2

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Southern California. Original written by Will Kwong.

Earth’s mantle reveals hidden treasures

Schematic representation of the process of subduction of tectonic plates and of a mantle plume rising from an LLSVP. In the latter, the mineral grains are larger than those in the subducted plates.
Schematic representation of the process of subduction of tectonic plates and of a mantle plume rising from an LLSVP. In the latter, the mineral grains are larger than those in the subducted plates.

Deeply hidden in Earth’s mantle there are two huge ‘islands’ with the size of a continent. New research from Utrecht University shows that these regions are not only hotter than the surrounding graveyard of cold sunken tectonic plates, but also that they must be ancient: at least half a billion years old, perhaps even older. These observations contradict the idea of a well-mixed and fast flowing Earth’s mantle, a theory that is becoming more and more questioned. “There is less flow in Earth’s mantle than is commonly thought.” This research will be published on January 22nd, 2025 in Nature.

Large earthquakes make the whole Earth ring like a bell with different tones, just like a musical instrument. Seismologists study Earth’s deep interior by investigating how much these tones are ‘out of tune’, because whole Earth oscillations will sound out of tune or less loud when they encounter anomalies. This way seismologists will be able to make images of the interior of our planet, just like a hospital doctor can ‘see’ through your body with X-rays. At the end of the last century, an analysis of these oscillations showed the existence of two subsurface ‘super-continents’: one under Africa and the other one under the Pacific Ocean, both hidden more than two thousand kilometres below the Earth’s surface. “Nobody knew what they are, and whether they are only a temporary phenomenon, or if they have been sitting there for millions or perhaps even billions of years,” says Arwen Deuss, seismologist and professor of Structure and composition of Earth’s deep interior at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “These two large islands are surrounded by a graveyard of tectonic plates which have been transported there by a process called ‘subduction’, where one tectonic plate dives below another plate and sinks all the way from the Earth’s surface down to a depth of almost three thousand kilometres.”

Slow waves

“We have known for years that these islands are located at the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle. And we see that seismic waves slow down there.” Earth scientists therefore call these regions ‘Large Low Seismic Velocity Provinces’ or LLSVPs. “The waves slow down because the LLSVPs are hot, just like you can’t run as fast in hot weather as you can when it’s colder.” Deuss and her colleague Sujania Talavera-Soza were keen to find out if they could discover more about these regions. “We added new information, the so-called ‘damping’ of seismic waves, which is the amount of energy that waves lose when they travel through the Earth. In order to do so, we did not only investigate how much the tones where out of tune, we also studied their sound volume.” Talavera-Soza adds: “Against our expectations, we found little damping in the LLSVPs, which made the tones sound very loud there. But we did find a lot of damping in the cold slab graveyard, where the tones sounded very soft. Unlike the upper mantle, where we found exactly what we expected: it is hot, and the waves are damped. Just like when the weather is hot outside and you go for a run, you don’t only slow down but you also get more tired than when it is cold outside.”

Grain size

Their colleague Laura Cobden, who specializes in the minerals that we find deep in the Earth, suggested to study the grain size of the LLSVPs. According to their American colleague Ulrich Faul, temperature alone cannot explain the absence of high damping in the LLSVPs. Deuss: “Grain size is much more important. Subducting tectonic plates that end up in the slab graveyard consist of small grains because they recrystallize on their journey deep into the Earth. A small grain size means a larger number of grains and therefore also a larger number of boundaries between the grains. Due to the large number of grain boundaries between the grains in the slab graveyard, we find more damping, because waves loose energy at each boundary they cross. The fact that the LLSVPs show very little damping, means that they must consist of much larger grains.”

Ancient

Those mineral grains do not grow overnight, which can only mean one thing: LLSVPs are lots and lots older than the surrounding slab graveyards. Even more so: the LLSVPs, with their much larger building blocks, are very rigid. Therefore, they do not take part in mantle convection (the flow in the Earth’s mantle). Thus, contrary to what the geography books teach us, the mantle cannot be well-mixed either. Talavera-Soza clarifies: “After all, the LLSVPs must be able to survive mantle convection one way or another.”

Engine

Knowledge of the Earth’s mantle is essential to understand the evolution of our planet. “And also to understand other phenomena at the Earth’s surface, such as vulcanism and mountain building,” Deuss adds. “The Earth’s mantle is the engine that drives all these phenomena. Take, for example, mantle plumes, which are large bubbles of hot material that rise from the Earth’s deep interior as in a lava lamp.” Once they finally reach the surface, they cause vulcanism, like under Hawaii. “And we think that those mantle plumes originate at the edges of the LLSVPs.”

Large earthquakes

In this type of research, seismologists make good use of oscillations caused by really large earthquakes, preferably quakes that take place at great depths, such as the great Bolivia earthquake of 1994. “It never made it into the newspapers, because it took place at a large depth of 650 km and luckily did not result in any damage or casualties at the Earth’s surface,” Deuss explains. The whole Earth oscillations, or tones, are mathematically described in such a way that we can easily ‘read’ the damping (i.e. how loud the oscillation is) due to a specific structure and separate it from the wave speed (i.e. how much out of tune it is). “Which is impressive, because the damping of the signal is only one-tenth of the total amount of information that we can unravel from these oscillations.” For this type of research, it is not necessary to wait until another earthquake occurs. The data from previous earthquakes is just as useful. “We can go back to 1975, because from that year onwards, seismometers became good enough to give us data of such high quality that they are useful for our research.”

Reference:
Sujania Talavera-Soza, Laura Cobden, Ulrich H. Faul, Arwen Deuss. Global 3D model of mantle attenuation using seismic normal modes. Nature, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08322-y

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Utrecht University.

Underwater mud volcanos are a haven for marine organisms

The underwater volcano Borealis Mud Volcano was discovered in the summer of 2023. Last year, the researchers were back at the volcano.Photo: Jørn Berger-Nyvoll / UiT
The underwater volcano Borealis Mud Volcano was discovered in the summer of 2023. Last year, the researchers were back at the volcano.
Photo: Jørn Berger-Nyvoll / UiT

One would think that a volcano was not the most hospitable place for living organisms. However, the Borealis Mud Volcano, at 400 m water depth, acts as a sanctuary for a number of marine species.

The underwater volcano Borealis Mud Volcano is located in the Barents Sea and was first discovered by researchers at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 2023. The discovery received a lot of attention, and images of the volcano circulated around the world. Now researchers from UiT, in collaboration with REV Ocean, have finally published the results from an interdisciplinary investigation showing that Borealis mud volcano has a unique ecological role as a natural sanctuary for several marine species in the Barents Sea.

While some parts of the crater floor of Borealis appear inhospitable to a variety of organisms, the carbonate crusts — a type of mineral formed thousands of years ago — that characterized Borealis provide a suitably hard substrate for species of anemones, serpulids, demosponges, and sparse octocoral colonies.

“Important for maintaining biodiversity”

In addition, the carbonates offer both shelter and feeding opportunities, playing an important role in sustaining the local fish populations. The researchers observed large schools of commercially valuable species like saithe and various demersal species such as spotted wolffish, cod, four-bearded rockling, and redfish (Sebastes spp.) clustering around the jagged carbonate formations.

“The redfish, for instance, is red listed, and we don’t know the consequences if it would disappear. Borealis is an oasis where different species can thrive and flourish. Thus, preserving ecosystems such as the Borealis Mud Volcano is essential for maintaining biodiversity and understanding the interactions between geology, geochemistry and biology in marine environments. We need that understanding, among other things, considering that the Arctic seabed plays an important role in oil and gas extraction activities and the emerging deep-sea mining industry,” says Professor Giuliana Panieri, lead author of the study recently published in Nature Communications.

Methan has leaked out, probably for thousands of years

Onboard the research vessel Kronprins Haakon in May 2024, researchers confirmed the previous discoveries. Using the remotely operated vehicle, ROV Aurora, the research team was able to make a series of observations of the underwater volcano. Among other things, they saw that it warms the surroundings to 11.5 degrees Celsius, while the seabed usually has a temperature of around 4 degrees Celsius.

The researchers also found sediments containing extinct, microscopic marine organisms from up to 2.5 million years ago and that small “mud cones” in the volcanic system are emitting vigorous methane-rich liquids. The fact that the seabed around the volcano is also characterized by extensive carbonate deposits indicates that methane has leaked out, probably for thousands of years.

“The Borealis Mud Volcano is a unique geological and ecological phenomenon that provides a rare insight into the complex interactions between geological processes and marine ecosystems. It is important to preserve these unique habitats, which play a crucial role in maintaining marine biodiversity,” says Panieri.

She reminds that, in the longer term, Norway has committed to the 30×30 target (protecting 30 % of land and sea by 2030) for spatial conservation measures of representative marine ecosystems, including in the deep sea. Protecting large areas of the deep-sea floor along the Norwegian margin may result in seep refugia acting as source populations for wider recolonization and restoration of benthic biological communities.

“The new findings show the power of international cooperation and how such cooperation can contribute to increasing our understanding of the world’s oceans,” says Panieri.

Reference:
Panieri, G., Argentino, C., Savini, A. et al. Sanctuary for vulnerable Arctic species at the Borealis Mud Volcano. Nat Commun, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-55712-x

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

Oceanic plate between Arabian and Eurasian continental plates is breaking away

The Zagros Mountains and sediments that have accumulated over millions of years along the depression at the base of the mountains.Photo: Renas Koshnaw
The Zagros Mountains and sediments that have accumulated over millions of years along the depression at the base of the mountains.
Photo: Renas Koshnaw

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the influence of the forces exerted by the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq on how much the surface of the Earth has bent over the last 20 million years. Their research revealed that in the present day, deep below the Earth’s surface, the Neotethys oceanic plate — the ocean floor that used to be between the Arabian and Eurasian continents — is breaking off horizontally, with a tear progressively lengthening from southeast Turkey to northwest Iran. Their findings show how the evolution of the Earth’s surface is controlled by processes deep within the planet’s interior. The research was published in the journal Solid Earth.

When two continents converge over millions of years, the oceanic floor between them slides to great depths beneath the continents.

Eventually, the continents collide, and masses of rock from their edges are lifted up into towering mountain ranges.

Over millions of years, the immense weight of these mountains causes the Earth’s surface around them to bend downward.

Over time, sediments eroded from the mountains accumulate in this depression, forming plains such as Mesopotamia in the Middle East.

The researchers modelled the downward bend of the Earth’s surfaces based on the Zagros Mountain’s load where the Arabian continent is colliding with Eurasia.

They combined the resulting size of the depression with the computed topography based on the Earth’s mantle to reproduce the unusually deep depression in the southeastern segment of the study area.

The researchers found that the weight of the mountains alone cannot account for the 3-4 km deep depression that has formed and been filled with sediment over the past 15 million years.

“Given the moderate topography in the north-western Zagros area, it was surprising to find out that so much sediment has accumulated in the part of the area we studied. This means the depression of the land is greater than could be caused by the load of the Zagros Mountains,” said Dr Renas Koshnaw, lead author and Postdoctoral Researcher at Göttingen University’s Department of Structural Geology and Geothermics.

Researchers propose that this is caused by the additional load of the sinking oceanic plate that is still attached to the Arabian plate.

Koshnaw adds: “This plate is pulling the region downward from below, making space for more sediment accumulation. Towards Turkey, the sediment-filled depression becomes much shallower, suggesting that the slab has broken off in this area, relieving the downward pull force.”

The geodynamic model developed in this research will benefit other fields as well.

“This research contributes to understanding how the Earth’s rigid outer shell functions,” explains Koshnaw.

Such research can lead to practical applications in the future by providing information for exploring natural resources such as sedimentary ore deposits and geothermal energy, and better characterization of the earthquake risks.

This research was made possible thanks to funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Reference:
Renas I. Koshnaw, Jonas Kley, Fritz Schlunegger. The Miocene subsidence pattern of the NW Zagros foreland basin reflects the southeastward propagating tear of the Neotethys slab. Solid Earth, 2024; 15 (11): 1365 DOI: 10.5194/se-15-1365-2024

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Göttingen.

Scientists develop groundbreaking biosensor for rare earth element detection

Conceptual artwork of a biosensor.
Conceptual artwork of a biosensor.

QUT synthetic biologists have developed a prototype for an innovative biosensor that can detect rare earth elements and be modified for a range of other applications.

Lanthanides (Lns) are elements used in electronics, electric motors, and batteries.

The problem is that we can’t extract enough of them to meet the growing demand and current extraction methods are expensive and environmentally damaging.

Professor Kirill Alexandrov and colleagues, from the QUT Centre of Agriculture and Bioeconomy and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, engineered proteins to create molecular nanomachines that generate easily detectable signals when they selectively bind to Lns.

Along with Professor Alexandrov, the international research team involved QUT researchers Dr Zhong Guo, Patricia Walden and Dr Zhenling Cui, in collaboration with researchers from CSIRO Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform and Clarkson University (USA).

Publishing their findings in Angewandte Chemie International, the team describe engineering a hybrid protein, or “chimera,” by combining a lanthanide-binding protein, LanM, with an antibiotic degrading enzyme called beta-lactamase.

This hybrid acts like a “switch” that becomes active only when lanthanides are present.

It can be used to detect and quantify Lns in liquids, producing a visible colour change or an electrical signal.

Impressively, bacteria modified with these chimeras were able to survive in the presence of antibiotics that otherwise would kill them — but only when lanthanides were present.

This highlights how precisely the proteins respond to these rare metals.

“This work opens up exciting possibilities for using biology to detect and recover rare earth metals,” Professor Alexandrov said.

“The prototype can also be modified for various biotechnological applications, including construction of living organisms capable of detecting and extracting valuable metals.”

The research team now plan to work on increasing the specificity of the molecular switch to better differentiate between closely related rare earth elements . It also explores the possibility of developing switches for other critical elements.

The team is in active discussions with potential industry partners who are interested in this technology.

“We also want to explore using the tool to engineer microbes that can directly extract rare earth minerals from ocean water,” Professor Alexandrov said.

“This is probably one of the best performing switches made and has given us a lot of insight into the mechanics of protein switches.”

Reference:
Kirill Alexandrov, Zhong Guo, Oleh Smutok, Raquel Aguiar Rocha, Patricia Walden, Evgeny Katz, Colin Scott, Chantal Ronacher, Zhenling Cui, Sergey Mureev. Lanthanide‐controlled protein switches: development and in vitro and in vivo applications. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2025; DOI: 10.1002/anie.202411584

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Queensland University of Technology.

Meteorite discovery challenges long-held theories on Earth’s missing elements

Planetesimal collisions during planet formation in the early solar systemImage courtesy: ASU/Kouji Kanba
Planetesimal collisions during planet formation in the early solar system
Image courtesy: ASU/Kouji Kanba

Understanding where Earth’s essential elements came from — and why some are missing — has long puzzled scientists. Now, a new study reveals a surprising twist in the story of our planet’s formation.

A new study led by Arizona State University’s Assistant Professor Damanveer Grewal from the School of Molecular Sciences and School of Earth and Space Exploration, in collaboration with researchers from Caltech, Rice University, and MIT, challenges traditional theories about why Earth and Mars are depleted in moderately volatile elements (MVEs). MVEs like copper and zinc play a crucial role in planetary chemistry, often accompanying life-essential elements such as water, carbon, and nitrogen.

Understanding their origin provides vital clues about why Earth became a habitable world.

Earth and Mars contain significantly fewer MVEs than primitive meteorites (chondrites), raising fundamental questions about planetary formation.

Published in Science Advances, the study takes a fresh approach by analyzing iron meteorites — remnants of the metallic cores of the earliest planetary building blocks — to uncover new insights.

“We found conclusive evidence that first-generation planetesimals in the inner solar system were unexpectedly rich in these elements,” said Grewal.

“This discovery reshapes our understanding of how planets acquired their ingredients.”

Until now, scientists believed that MVEs were lost either because they never fully condensed in the early solar system or escaped during planetesimal differentiation.

However, this study reveals a different story: many of the first planetesimals held onto their MVEs, suggesting that the building blocks of Earth and Mars lost theirs later — during a period of violent cosmic collisions that shaped their formation.

Surprisingly, the team found that many inner solar system planetesimals retained chondrite-like MVE abundances, showing that they accreted and preserved MVEs despite undergoing differentiation.

This suggests that the progenitors of Earth and Mars did not start out depleted in these elements, but instead, their loss occurred over a prolonged history of collisional growth rather than incomplete condensation in the solar nebula or planetesimal differentiation.

“Our work redefines how we understand the chemical evolution of planets,” Grewal explained. “It shows that the building blocks of Earth and Mars were originally rich in these life-essential elements, but intense collisions during planetary growth caused their depletion.”

Reference:
Damanveer S. Grewal, Surjyendu Bhattacharjee, Bidong Zhang, Nicole X. Nie, Yoshinori Miyazaki. Enrichment of moderately volatile elements in first-generation planetesimals of the inner Solar System. Science Advances, 2025; 11 (6) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq7848

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Arizona State University. Original written by Kim Baptista.

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