Earth’s surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks of Earth’s crust. This movement may be why life exists here. Earth is the only known planet with plate tectonics and the only known planet … Read more
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to spend a night on Mars? This excerpt from the new book “Daydreaming in the Solar System” by John E. Moores and Jesse Rogerson, takes a poetic look at what it might be like to explore the Red Planet if you were faced with the daunting … Read more
Data from India’s recent Chandrayaan-3 mission supports the idea that an ocean of molten rock once covered the moon. Scientists from the mission have published their new findings in the journal Nature. On August 23 2023, a lander called Vikram successfully touched down on the lunar surface. Controllers then deployed a rover called Pragyan, which … Read more
The Moon’s surface is pockmarked with more than 200 known pits where rocks and regolith collapsed into depths unknown. New research has found that one of those pits, in Mare Tranquillitatis, collapsed into a lava tube and made an underground cave conduit accessible from the lunar surface. “We found a sort of front door to … Read more
The “Eye of the Sahara” — also known as the “Eye of Africa” or the Richat structure — is a giant rock dome, carved with concentric rings, that looks like a giant bullseye when seen from above. The eye is visible from space and has been known to astronauts and scientists since the earliest crewed … Read more
One of the most extraordinary stories of human migration unfolded around 70,000 years ago, as humans crossed from Southeast Asia into modern-day Australia, traversing a now-submerged, Atlantis-like landscape, and becoming the first people to call that land home. A rich archaeological record provides ample evidence that this happened. But researchers have long been stumped by … Read more
A collection of rocks scattered on an ancient shoreline on Mars might indicate that the Red Planet was once far more Earth-like than scientists previously thought. The rocks, discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover, are unusually rich in manganese oxide — a chemical that adds to growing evidence that the once-habitable Mars may have sported Earth-like … Read more
The “gateway to the underworld,” a huge crater in Siberia’s permafrost, is growing by 35 million cubic feet (1 million cubic meters) every year as the frozen ground melts, according to a new study. The crater, officially known as the Batagay (also spelled Batagaika) crater or megaslump, features a rounded cliff face that was first … Read more
The moon is much more seismically active than we realized, a new study shows. A reanalysis of abandoned data from NASA’s Apollo missions has uncovered more than 22,000 previously unknown moonquakes — nearly tripling the total number of known seismic events on the moon. Moonquakes are the lunar equivalent of earthquakes, caused by movement in … Read more
Scientists have discovered a giant volcano on Mars that has been “hidden in plain sight” for more than 50 years. The volcano is around 280 miles (450 kilometers) wide and more than 29,600 feet (9,000 meters) high. It is located in the eastern part of Mars’ Tharsis volcanic province near the planet’s equator, scientists revealed … Read more
