Lifeboat Foundation

For nearly 60 million years, our home planet was likely frozen into a big snowball.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence of Earth’s transition from a tropical underwater world, writhing with photosynthetic bacteria, to a frozen wasteland – all preserved within the layers of giant rocks in a chain of Scottish and Irish islands.

The team, led by researchers from University College London (UCL), examined more than 2,000 grains of zircon from 11 sandstone samples, taken from up to 200 meters within the 1.1 km-thick (0.7 miles) Port Askaig formation, and the older, underlying Garbh Eileach formation, which is 70 meters thick.

A study, published in the journal Science Bulletin and led by Dr. Haiping Hu from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOP, CAS), explores the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) and non-Bloch bands.

Recently, an inelastic neutron scattering work on the bilayer nickelate La3Ni2O7-δ polycrystal finished by a team from Sun Yat-sen University was published in Science Bulletin. The team employed neutron spectroscopy to study the magnetic ground state and spin dynamics of La3Ni2O7-δ at ambient pressure.

The nature of Earth’s deep past can often feel intangible. From our modern moment, eons billions of years in the past seem hard to touch. Among some of our planet’s rocks, however, are tatters and fragments from those distant times that can offer us a peek at what our planet was like when our ancestors were single-celled organisms. By studying some of these vestiges, geologists have been able to detect what was transpiring under the Earth’s crust over 2.5 billion years ago.

Below our feet—and our planet’s outer crust— Earth’s mantle makes up the vast majority of the planet’s volume. Different layers of the mantle are made up of different rock types, and one of the most common is an igneous rock high in silica content called peridotite. In the past, when geologists have compared samples of prehistoric peridotite from Earth’s mantle and their modern equivalents, they’ve found a significant discrepancy.

Scientists have unveiled plasma and magnetic field interactions, revealing insights into cosmic jet formation.

An exploration of the dual mystery of the cosmological lithium problem, but also the weird abundance of lithium in certain stars.

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Large-scale earthquakes and tsunamis have historically affected the western regions of the U.S. and Canada and are likely to do so in the future.

Off the southern coasts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California, a 600-mile-long strip exists where the Pacific Ocean floor gradually subducts eastward beneath North America.

This area, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, hosts a megathrust fault, a place where tectonic plates move against each other in a highly dangerous way. The plates can periodically lock up and build stress over wide areas―eventually to be released when they finally lurch against each other.

L.A. Times metro reporter Ron Lin spoke to several seismology experts and joined Lisa McRee to share their perspectives on the significance of the most recent temblor and which types of buildings are of concern.

Curtin University researchers found that Western Australia’s Hamersley iron ore deposits are one billion years younger than previously believed, formed during significant geological events 1.4 to 1.1 billion years ago.

Research conducted by Curtin University has uncovered that the vast iron ore deposits in Western Australia’s Hamersley Province are approximately one billion years younger than previously estimated. This finding could significantly boost the search for more of the resource.

Using a new geochronology technique to accurately measure the age of iron oxide minerals, researchers found the Hamersley deposits formed between 1.4 and 1.1 billion years ago, rather than 2.2 billion years ago as previously estimated.