How magma and water shaped the iconic Columbia River Gorge

University of Oregon researchers are adding new details to the geological history of the iconic Columbia River Gorge, a wide river canyon that cuts through the volcanic peaks of the Cascades along the border between Oregon ...

Study sheds light on how Earth cycles its fossil carbon

As the primary element of life on our planet, carbon is constantly journeying from living creatures down into the Earth's crust and back up into the atmosphere, but until recently, quantifying this journey was virtually impossible.

Finding Argoland: How a lost continent resurfaced

Geologists have long known that around 155 million years ago, a 5,000 km long piece of continent broke off western Australia and drifted away. They can see that by the 'void' it left behind: a basin hidden deep below the ...

Digging water channels in mineral stishovite

Stishovite has the same chemical formula as silica quartz (SiO2) but it has much higher density. While SiO2 is abundant on Earth's crust, it is also a major component of basalt, a type of igneous rock that is rich in iron ...

Carbon dioxide, not water, triggers explosive basaltic volcanoes

Geoscientists have long thought that water—along with shallow magma stored in Earth's crust—drives volcanoes to erupt. Now, thanks to newly developed research tools at Cornell, scientists have learned that gaseous carbon ...

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Crust (geology)

In geology, a crust is the outermost solid shell of a rocky planet or moon, which is chemically distinct from the underlying mantle. The crusts of Earth, our Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Io, and other planetary bodies have been generated largely by igneous processes, and these crusts are richer in incompatible elements than their respective mantles.

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