Latest Structure of the Earth Stories

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As we are quickly approaching the two-year anniversary of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that prompted the devastating Honshu tsunami, we learned this week about a rapid-response drilling operation at the site of the earthquake. The March 2011 earthquake, a magnitude 9.0 temblor, was responsible for producing a 164-foot-tall slip along the fault. This is the single largest slip ever recorded in an earthquake. Needless to say, such a...

University of Utah Partly molten, Florida-sized blob forms atop Earth's core A University of Utah seismologist analyzed seismic waves that bombarded Earth's core, and believes he got a look at the earliest roots of Earth's most cataclysmic kind of volcanic eruption. But don't worry. He says it won't happen for perhaps 200 million years. "What we may be detecting is the start of one of these large eruptive events that – if it ever happens – could cause very massive destruction on...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers for the first time have discovered evidence supporting the theory that the processes that act as catalysts for volcanic activity today are similar to those that occurred nearly four billion years ago. Writing in the journal Geology, Frances Jenner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and colleagues report that 3.8 billion-year-old volcanic rocks recovered from an island in southwestern Greenland support previous...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The Earth’s core formed under more oxidizing conditions than previously believed, claims a new study published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science Express. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) geophysicist Rick Ryerson and an international team of colleagues made the discovery following a series of laser-heated diamond anvil cell experiments at high pressure (350,000 to 700,000 atmospheres) and temperatures...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to a new study by researchers at Rice University, the Earth's mantle magma melts far hotter and deeper in the Earth's core than previously thought, a discovery that will have lasting implications for our understanding of the planet's geophysical and geochemical properties. The research team, led by Rajdeep Dasgupta, put small amounts of peridotite under large pressures in a laboratory to determine that rock can and does...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Mars Curiosity rover is sending data and pictures to Earth from Mars every day with only a 14 minute delay, a monumental feat of human accomplishment. Yet, for all our research into the stars, there remains a great deal of discovery to be had here on Earth, particularly below the surface. Now, a global team of drillers, geologists and other scientists and researchers plan to spend $1 billion to go the other way, deep into the...

Scientific deep sea drilling vessel Chikyu sets a world new record by drilling down and obtains rock samples from deeper than 2,111 meters below the seafloor off Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the implementing organization for scientific expedition aboard the Chikyu, announced this achievement on 6th September, 2012. Chikyu made this achievement during the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition,...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Over the last 50 million years, the Caribbean islands have been pushed east, driven by the movement of the Earth's viscous mantel against the more rooted South American continent. A new study by University of Southern California (USC) geophysicists, published in Nature Geoscience, gives us a better understanding of how continents resist the constant movement of the Earth's plates and what effect the continental plates have in...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For decades, scientists thought the only place in our solar system that consisted of plate tectonics was right here on Earth. But a UCLA scientist has discovered, analyzing data from two instruments, that the Red Planet has also shown evidence of tectonic plate movement. The science of plate tectonics revolves around the idea that huge crustal plates beneath a planet’s surface are constantly moving,...

On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be connected with processes in the mantle. These are the research results presented by a group of geoscientists in the new advance edition of "Nature Geoscience" on Sunday, July 29th. The results show how the rapid processes in the outer core, which flows at rates of up to about one millimeter per...