Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The northern and southern hemispheres of Mars are topographically distinct. Crustal thickness analyses and numerical simulations suggest a giant impact just after the crust differentiated 4.4 billion years ago as a plausible cause for this dichotomy.
International Polar Year 2007–2009 had three predecessors 125, 75 and 50 years ago. These international research efforts were not free from geopolitical interests.
Geoscientists explain women's under-representation in our field along three dominant themes: the structure of academia, historically low numbers of women, and women's views and choices. Which factor they perceive as most important depends overwhelmingly on their gender.