During the Ediacaran period more than a half billion years ago, clay mineral coats likely shielded delicate remains, helping them become exquisitely preserved in rock, recent experiments suggest.
geology
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Cold Temperatures Set Off Slow-Moving Landslides
Falling ground temperatures in the cold season are found to trigger shallow, slow-moving landslides on slopes with clayey soil.
Posted inFeatures
New Insights into North America’s Midcontinent Rift
The Midcontinent Rift has characteristics of a large igneous province, causing geologists to rethink some long-standing assumptions about how this giant feature formed.
Posted inNews
Tiny, Deep Quakes Increase on San Andreas as Tides Tug on Fault
When the gravity of the Sun and Moon causes Earth's crust to bulge every 2 weeks, slow-moving earthquakes proliferate in the lower reaches of the San Andreas, a new study finds.
Posted inNews
Earth Fissures May No Longer Get Mapped in Arizona
A program that monitors giant cracks in the ground that suddenly appear after heavy rain could become a casualty of budget cuts to the Arizona Geological Survey.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Do Tropical Forests Slow Knickpoints in Rivers?
Using Puerto Rico's Luquillo Mountains as a case study, scientists use the region's geological history to study how knickpoints—areas where there's a sharp change in the river's slope—move over time.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Despite Dryness, Quartz Grains Can Deform in Earth's Crust
A comparison of water content in undeformed and deformed quartz indicates that grains may change shape via weakening processes that cannot be duplicated in laboratory experiments.
Posted inOpinions
The Broken Bridge Between Geology and Museums
For lack of funding, irreplaceable collections of mineral specimens may be lost. The Earth science community must rethink the role of museums as archives and outlets for information.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Polarity Reversals in the Earth’s Magnetic Field
Studies of geomagnetic polarity reversals have generated some of the biggest and most interesting debates in the paleomagnetic and wider solid Earth geophysics communities over the last 25 years.
Posted inNews
Gypsum Forms in an Unexpected Way
Scientists spot the "stem cell" building blocks that lay the foundation for gypsum's formation.