Featured
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News |
China’s Moon trip reveals surprisingly recent volcanic activity
The Chang’e-5 mission returned the first lunar samples since the 1970s, with bits of lava dated at two billion years old.
- Jonathan O'Callaghan
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News |
Science agency on trial following deadly White Island volcano eruption
The rare example of a government research agency facing criminal charges after a natural disaster underlines the perils of communicating and managing risk.
- Dyani Lewis
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Article |
The importance of lake breach floods for valley incision on early Mars
Lake breach flooding rapidly eroded almost a quarter of the volume of incised valleys on early Mars, influencing the topography of the wider Martian landscape.
- Timothy A. Goudge
- , Alexander M. Morgan
- & Caleb I. Fassett
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Research Highlight |
The oil-field ‘fugitive’ that can slip into the water supply
Methane gas that steals away from leaky fossil-fuel wells can hide underground and taint groundwater.
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News |
Seed-inspired vehicles and a deadly lake — the week in infographics
Nature highlights three key infographics from the week in science and research.
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News Feature |
How dangerous is Africa’s explosive Lake Kivu?
An unusual lake in central Africa could one day release a vast cloud of greenhouse gases that suffocates millions of people. But it’s not clear whether the threat is getting worse.
- Nicola Jones
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Article |
Three-dimensional magnetic stripes require slow cooling in fast-spread lower ocean crust
A record of Earth’s magnetic field constructed from near-bottom magnetization observations and oriented samples provides three-dimensional imaging of magnetic stripes in fast-spread crust, and suggests slow cooling off-axis, as opposed to deep hydrothermal cooling close to the spreading ridge.
- Sarah M. Maher
- , Jeffrey S. Gee
- & Barbara E. John
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Correspondence |
Anthropocene: event or epoch?
- Andrew M. Bauer
- , Matthew Edgeworth
- & Dorothy J. Merritts
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Research Highlight |
Seismic sleuths unmask the ‘earthquake’ that wasn’t
People in one Indian state flooded into the streets and onto a seismology app after predictions of a quake that never happened.
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Nature Podcast |
The billion years missing from Earth’s history
A new theory to explain missing geological time, the end of leaded petrol, and the ancient humans of Arabia.
- Shamini Bundell
- , Dan Fox
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Book Review |
Dispatches from a world aflame
From California’s deadliest blaze to a new planetary fire regime, how wildfires are reshaping our climate-changed planet.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Success! Mars rover finally collects its first rock core
NASA’s Perseverance rover lives up to its name, drilling and storing Martian rock after a misstep in August.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlight |
So much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving
As the continents’ frozen burden dissipates, the ground deforms — not only in the immediate area, but also in far-flung locations.
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News |
Home seismometers provide crucial data on Haiti’s quake
A volunteer network helps to monitor aftershocks and illuminate the country’s earthquake hazards.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Why NASA’s Mars rover failed to collect its first rock core
Intriguing rocks turned out to be too crumbly for Perseverance to drill successfully. It’s moving on to try elsewhere.
- Alexandra Witze
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Review Article |
Deep continental roots and cratons
Cratons are the oldest parts of the Earth’s continents; this Review concludes that the production of widespread, thick and strong lithosphere via the process of orogenic thickening was fundamental to the eventual emergence of extensive continental landmasses.
- D. Graham Pearson
- , James M. Scott
- & Peter B. Kelemen
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News |
Excitement as Mars rover drills first rock core for return to Earth
The sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover might be volcanic, helping scientists to understand the red planet's evolution.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlight |
Volcano that built an island paradise is attuned to the sea
Eruptions of Santorini volcano, which created the Greek island of the same name, are linked to drops in sea level.
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Nature Video |
Strange patterns could be the world's oldest animal fossil
Branching patterns could be evidence of an 890-million-year-old sponge, pushing back the earliest animal fossil by 300 million years.
- Nick Petrić Howe
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News & Views |
Earthquakes triggered by underground fluid injection modelled for a tectonically active oil field
An analysis of the Val d’Agri oil field in Italy provides insight into how processes associated with wastewater disposal trigger earthquakes — and how such effects can be reduced to maintain the economic viability of mature oil fields.
- Mirko van der Baan
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Article |
A process-based approach to understanding and managing triggered seismicity
A multidisciplinary method for managing triggered seismicity is developed using detailed subsurface information to calibrate geomechanical and earthquake source physics models, and is applied to the Val d’Agri oil field in seismically active southern Italy.
- Bradford H. Hager
- , James Dieterich
- & Andreas Plesch
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News |
Water transformed into shiny, golden metal
Electrons from a droplet of sodium and potassium turn water into a metallic material that conducts electricity.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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News |
Sponge-like fossil could be Earth’s earliest known animal
Fossil discovered in northwestern Canada could rewrite the early history of animal life — but some palaeontologists are not convinced it’s real.
- Max Kozlov
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Research Highlight |
Toxic mercury rides rivers into the sea
Research suggests that rivers are a bigger source of mercury in coastal waters than is the atmosphere — a finding that contradicts some global models.
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News |
China’s space station is preparing to host 1,000 scientific experiments
Researchers around the world are eagerly awaiting the completion of Tiangong, to study topics from dark matter and gravitational waves to the growth of cancer and pathogenic bacteria.
- Smriti Mallapaty
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Research Highlight |
Damage to a royal town on the Danube warns of seismic danger
Documents and physical evidence hint that a major earthquake struck Visegrád in Hungary, once home to kings.
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages feature a 1971 report of ancient rock carvings indicating astronomical knowledge, and an 1871 look at alpine mountaineering and glaciers.
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Research Highlight |
Telecoms satellites’ new purpose: spying on Earth’s magnetic field
Clues to the forces generated by the planet’s core emerge from observations intended for satellite navigation.
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News & Views |
Fluid-rich extinct volcanoes cause small earthquakes beneath New Zealand
Imaging of a region where an oceanic tectonic plate descends below another plate reveals evidence that fluid-rich extinct volcanoes can help to lubricate the interface between plates — reducing the potential for large earthquakes.
- Catherine A. Rychert
- & Nicholas Harmon
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Article |
Fluid-rich subducting topography generates anomalous forearc porosity
Electromagnetic data collected at the northern Hikurangi Margin, New Zealand show that a seamount on the incoming plate allows more water to subduct, compared with normal, unfaulted oceanic lithosphere.
- Christine Chesley
- , Samer Naif
- & Dan Bassett
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Where I Work |
Shifting shores: delving into the past with mud cores
Geologist Nicole Khan examines coastal sediment samples to find out how sea levels have changed over the past 1,000 years.
- Amber Dance
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Article |
Ridgecrest aftershocks at Coso suppressed by thermal destressing
Thirty years of geothermal heat production at Coso in California depleted shear stresses within the geothermal reservoir, which changed its faulting style and inhibited aftershocks from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake.
- Kyungjae Im
- , Jean-Philippe Avouac
- & Derek Elsworth
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News |
Deadly Myanmar mine disaster caused by poor planning, say data sleuths
First scientific study of Myanmar’s worst mining accident reveals that human error contributed to the 2020 disaster that killed at least 172 people.
- Andrew Silver
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Clusters of flowstone ages are not supported by statistical evidence
- Robyn Pickering
- , Andy I. R. Herries
- & John Hancox
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Article |
Mesozoic cupules and the origin of the angiosperm second integument
Analysis of recurved cupules from a newly discovered Early Cretaceous silicified peat in Inner Mongolia, China and comparison with other potentially related Mesozoic plant fossils provides insight into the origins of angiosperms.
- Gongle Shi
- , Fabiany Herrera
- & Peter R. Crane
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Research Highlight |
Antarctic volcano trembles in the wake of distant quakes
Seismic activity is unleashed at the world’s southernmost active volcano by major earthquakes in Chile and the Indian Ocean.
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Nature Video |
Hawaii’s surprise volcanic eruption: Lessons from Kilauea 2018
Volcanologists have been studying the unexpected eruption to try and better predict future hazards.
- Charlotte Stoddart
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Research Highlight |
A deep look into the physics of earthquake slip
Laboratory experiments provide a glimpse of what happens when rocks fail.
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News & Views |
Ancient continental blocks soldered from below
A study of melting in the mantle under northern Canada more than one billion years ago shows that the oldest blocks of continent not only break apart but can also be repaired by the gluing action of major melting episodes.
- Stephen Foley
- & Craig O’Neill
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Article |
Plume-driven recratonization of deep continental lithospheric mantle
Upwelling of mantle plumes is proposed as a mechanism for craton healing after substantial disruption of their roots, enabling them to return to their original lithospheric thickness.
- Jingao Liu
- , D. Graham Pearson
- & John P. Armstrong
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Article |
Dynamics of large effusive eruptions driven by caldera collapse
A model for eruptions resulting in caldera collapse reconciles observations of quasi-periodic stick–slip events along annular faults and the large erupted volumes characteristic of such events, highlighting the role of topography-generated pressures.
- Alberto Roman
- & Paul Lundgren
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Article |
Earthquakes indicated magma viscosity during Kīlauea’s 2018 eruption
Rotated fault-plane solutions in earthquake swarms at volcanoes could provide an early indication of relatively viscous magma, and hence of the style and hazard potential of an impending eruption.
- D. C. Roman
- , A. Soldati
- & B. R. Shiro
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Research Highlight |
Melting glacier threatens to shove a mighty river off course
Climate change could send Alaska’s Alsek River into a new channel, with potentially far-reaching impacts for humans.
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Article |
Oxygen isotopes trace the origins of Earth’s earliest continental crust
Oxygen isotopes and whole-rock geochemistry show that the water required to make Earth’s first continental crust was primordial and derived from the mantle, not surface water introduced by subduction.
- Robert H. Smithies
- , Yongjun Lu
- & Simon P. Johnson
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News & Views |
Oceanic fault zones reconstructed
Tectonic-plate material is generally thought to be neither created nor destroyed at plate boundaries called oceanic transform faults. An analysis of sea-floor topography suggests that this assumption is incorrect.
- Garrett Ito
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Article |
Extensional tectonics and two-stage crustal accretion at oceanic transform faults
Oceanic transform faults are systemically deeper than their associated fracture zones, owing to the plate boundary experiencing increasingly oblique shear at increasing depths below the seafloor.
- Ingo Grevemeyer
- , Lars H. Rüpke
- & Colin W. Devey
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News Feature |
How microbes in permafrost could trigger a massive carbon bomb
Genomics studies are helping to reveal how bacteria and archaea influence one of Earth’s largest carbon stores as it begins to thaw.
- Monique Brouillette
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Book Review |
A tour of deep time brings comfort in hard times
A whirlwind geological journey in which the past meets the present and the future.
- Alexandra Witze