College Teaches One Class at a Time

It's a silly old expression, but Professor Eric Leonard says it's true: The best geologist is the one who's seen the most rocks.

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Tall creationist tales from the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon was formed a few thousand years ago by Noah's flood, and not a few million years ago by geological forces, right? So says a glossy book still on sale in Grand Canyon National Park, despite scientists' protests.

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Soil minerals point to planet-wide ocean on Mars

Much of Mars’s water may still be present in the form of buried ice - this region near the equator that may consist of jumbled blocks of ice beneath a shroud of dust (Image: ESA/DLR/F U Berlin/G Neukum)

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DNA recovered from fossilised bones of the moa, a giant extinct bird, has revealed a new geological history of New Zealand, reports a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The scalding-hot sea that supposedly covered the early Earth may in fact never have existed, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers who analyzed isotope ratios in 3.4 billion-year-old ocean floor rocks.

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A crack in the Earth's crust – which could be the forerunner to a new ocean – ripped open in just days in 2005, a new study suggests. The opening, located in the Afar region of Ethiopia, presents a unique opportunity for geologists to study how mid-ocean ridges form.

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A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean.

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Certain travel destinations remind you that you live on a planet—an old, weathered, tectonic-plate-shifting planet. The Earth has been smothered by glaciers, eroded by wind and water, splattered with lava and slammed by debris from outer space.

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A math formula has been formulated to explain the even spacing of valleys.

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From the ground, a 100-hectare site just north of Italy's Venice airport looks like nothing more than rolling fields of corn and soybeans. But it's actually home to a buried Roman metropolis called Altinum, considered the precursor of ancient Venice.

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Did you know that the average automobile contains more than a ton of iron and steel, 240 lbs of aluminum, 50 lbs of carbon, 42 lbs of copper, 41 lbs of silicon, 22 lbs of zinc, and more than thirty other mineral commodities, including titanium, platinum, and gold? Do you know the …

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Stromatolites are dome- or column-like sedimentary rock structures that are formed in shallow water, layer by layer, over long periods of geologic time.

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The vast amount of carbon stored in the arctic and boreal regions of the world is more than double that previously estimated, according to a study published this week.

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Finding a fossil in a coal mine is no big deal. Coal deposits, after all, are petrified peat swamps, and peat is made from decaying plants, which leave their imprints in mud and clay as it hardens into shale stone.

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Arctic core proves red hot

Evidence from the past provides a crystal ball for the future. A sediment core from 400m below the seabed of the Arctic Ocean showed that Fifty-five million years ago, deep in the Eocene, the North Pole was ice-free and enjoying tropical temperatures.

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Can Anyone Identify this Rock / Fossil ???

I've been a rock hound since I toddled about in the Virginia countryside. Over the years, I've taken lots of trips and vacations, but while family and friends were packing the souvenir shops, I would be out looking for rocks as mementos of the trip.

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A massive bombardment of meteorites billions of years ago could have brought in enough water and carbon dioxide to jump-start the chemistry that allowed the Earth to develop into the garden spot of our solar system.

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Photos of different sand grains from around the world

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New Newsvine Group .... Rock Hounds

What is a rock? We all know what rocks are right? The are lying on the ground everywhere! They are the mountains, and canyons that you can't help but notice. We have all thrown them, sat on them, and dug them out of our gardens.

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The implement is considered the most important stone tool in the establishment of the geological antiquity of human kind.

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A massive underwater mountain discovered off the Indonesian island of Sumatra could be a volcano with potentially catastrophic power, a scientist said Friday.

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Nobody has yet come up with a sufficiently acceptable theory as to just how these rather large rocks manage to move across the floor of this dry lake bed in Death Valley, California.

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CHICAGO (Reuters) - A heavy bombardment by asteroids the size of Ireland was not enough to wipe out life on Earth 3.9 billion years ago, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that turns back the clock of life by 500 million years.

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10 Reasons Everyone Should Know About the Earth: The Value of Earth Science Education

In today's schools, Earth Science is becoming a dying science. In many school districts, it historically was a class required of all students in high school.

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Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.

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Were major extinction events real biological catastrophes or were they merely the result of gaps in the fossil record? Research by a team of geologists from the Universities of Bristol, Plymouth, and Saratov State in Russia, has shed new light on a debate that has divided scienti …

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This one just hurts to watch. And to make matters worse, a smug Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) actually thinks he "baffled" Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate, during this exchange in a hearing today:

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Red jasper cored from layers 3.46 billion years old suggests that not only did the oceans contain abundant oxygen then, but that the atmosphere was as oxygen rich as it is today, according to geologists.

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