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Category: Geography/Geology

Earth’s oldest evidence of life is written in stone – but it’s at risk of disappearing

Earth’s oldest evidence of life is written in stone – but it’s at risk of disappearing

Stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay, viewed from the boardwalk. Heidi Allen By Heidi Jane Allen, The University of Melbourne Today, our planet is teeming with life, but it has not always looked the same. Long before forests reached skyward, animals walked on land, and the rise and fall of dinosaurs, our planet was shaped by a much smaller, more unassuming form of life. And we can still find traces of it today. These ancient fossils, the earliest visible evidence…

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‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

The Guardian reports: The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts. The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever…

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A melting glacier contributed to the deadly Nepal floods. We can expect more like this

A melting glacier contributed to the deadly Nepal floods. We can expect more like this

NPR reports: More than a thousand people are missing and at least 400 people are dead after flash flooding tore through Nepal and Tibet early Wednesday. According to initial assessments, a massive chunk of ice snapped off a glacier and tumbled thousands of feet into the valley below. Rock, ice and mud plunged down for miles, washing away communities along the river. Scientists say glaciers in this region, and around the world, are increasingly unstable because of human-caused global warming….

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Global warming is triggering earthquakes

Global warming is triggering earthquakes

Science reports: Climate change is worsening many natural hazards, including droughts, heat waves, and storm surges. Now, a new one has joined the list: earthquakes. Researchers have found that as global warming accelerates melting of mountaintop glaciers, the meltwater, percolating underground, increases the risk of damaging earthquakes. The evidence comes from beneath Grandes Jorasses, a glacier-clad peak in the Alps that is part of the Mont Blanc massif, home to Western Europe’s tallest mountains. Precise seismic records show a heat…

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Iran asserts sole control of Strait of Hormuz, warns challenges will bring more violence

Iran asserts sole control of Strait of Hormuz, warns challenges will bring more violence

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iran has the exclusive right to manage traffic in the Strait of Hormuz under the preliminary peace deal signed with President Trump, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday, adding that attempts to circumvent its authority risk triggering more strikes like those seen in recent days. The comments were among the clearest by a top official that Iran expects sole authority over the strait under the deal aimed at reopening the strategic waterway. They are…

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The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

Siddhant Pusdekar writes: For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration —…

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What does the Anthropocene look like from below the Earth’s surface?

What does the Anthropocene look like from below the Earth’s surface?

James Dinneen writes: When Soviet engineers began to drain the Aral Sea in the 1960s, they could hardly foresee the scale on which their handiwork would alter the planet. The goal was to irrigate large areas of what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to grow cotton, part of a utopian project stretching back to czarist Russia to civilise the ‘backward’ regions of central Asia. Achieving this meant diverting most of the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, which was…

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Ukrainian long-range drones are turning Russia’s size into a weakness

Ukrainian long-range drones are turning Russia’s size into a weakness

Peter Dickinson writes: For centuries, Russia’s colossal size has been widely regarded as the country’s greatest asset. From Charles XII of Sweden to Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, a long line of would-be conquerors have invaded Russia only for their armies to swallowed up by the vastness of the country. Ukraine is now attempting to turn this military logic on its head with a strategic bombing campaign that aims to exploit Russia’s immensity and transform it from a key strength…

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The oldest river in the world ran through Pangea

The oldest river in the world ran through Pangea

ZME Science reports: Rivers are poor archivists of their own past. They don’t sit still like fossils, or record a single birthdate like volcanic rock. Instead, they wander across floodplains, cut into rock and often move around or even abandon their channels. A river can spend millions of years destroying the very evidence that would prove how long it’s been there. That makes the question of the world’s oldest river surprisingly difficult. When geologists ask which river is the oldest…

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Deep-Earth map reveals fragment of a lost U.S. continent

Deep-Earth map reveals fragment of a lost U.S. continent

Science reports: Along the eastern front of the Appalachian Mountains, buried just below the surface, lies a fragment of a lost continent. Running from Maine to Georgia, the 200-kilometer-thick slab of crust was probably created by volcanic eruptions during the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent some 200 million years ago and later buried by silt from eroding mountains. Known as the Piedmont Resistor, this piece of Pangaea is one of the signature discoveries of the Magnetotelluric (MT) Array, 1800 temporary…

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Has the Strait of Hormuz emerged as Iran’s most powerful form of deterrence?

Has the Strait of Hormuz emerged as Iran’s most powerful form of deterrence?

By Christian Emery, UCL One of the US and Israel’s justifications for launching the war on Iran was to ensure the regime in Tehran could never possess nuclear weapons, the ultimate deterrent against external attack. But the main lesson that has been taken from the war, according to some commentators, is that Iran’s own geography already provides it with all the deterrent it needs. The US-Israeli strikes have inflicted massive damage on Iran’s leadership and have destroyed billions of US…

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‘You cannot beat geography’: Iran already has a nuclear weapon. ‘It’s called the Strait of Hormuz.’

‘You cannot beat geography’: Iran already has a nuclear weapon. ‘It’s called the Strait of Hormuz.’

The New York Times reports: The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks. It turns out that Iran already has a deterrent: its own geography. Iran’s decision to flex its control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows, has brought global economic pain…

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How geography powers Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, despite U.S. blockade

How geography powers Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, despite U.S. blockade

The Washington Post reports: Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained a week after the United States and Iran said they would facilitate vessel passage under a two-week ceasefire agreement. Instead, tensions have escalated. After Iran said ships must coordinate with its forces — and, in some cases, pay a toll — President Donald Trump called the demands “extortion” and announced Sunday that the United States would block ships entering or exiting Iranian ports, adding pressure to an…

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How the harsh icy world of Snowball Earth shaped life today

How the harsh icy world of Snowball Earth shaped life today

Graham Shields writes: As Scotland’s west coast recedes from view, the ocean resembles a mirror, broken only by the swash of the boat and the dolphins chasing us. We’re headed to the craggy, uninhabited islands known as the Garvellachs. Only reachable during Scotland’s short summer, there is nothing between here and North America, and so landing – or rather jumping hopefully onto slippery rocks – is dependent on the kindness of the Atlantic swell. We’ve come to see a globally…

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Paleolithic ingenuity: 13,000-year-old raised-relief map discovered in France

Paleolithic ingenuity: 13,000-year-old raised-relief map discovered in France

University of Adelaide: Researchers have discovered what may be the world’s oldest three-dimensional map, located within a quartzitic sandstone megaclast in the Paris Basin. The research is published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. The Ségognole 3 rock shelter, known since the 1980s for its artistic engravings of two horses in a Late Paleolithic style on either side of a female pubic figuration, has now been revealed to contain a miniature representation of the surrounding landscape. Dr. Anthony Milnes from…

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Nearly 20% of the cultural differences between societies boil down to ecological factors – new research

Nearly 20% of the cultural differences between societies boil down to ecological factors – new research

How much of a culture could be due to things like the grain it traditionally grew? Visoot Uthairam/Moment via Getty Images By Alexandra Wormley, Arizona State University and Michael Varnum, Arizona State University In some parts of the world, the rules are strict; in others they are far more lax. In some places, people are likely to plan for the future, while in others people are more likely to live in the moment. In some societies people prefer more personal…

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