Science News

French geophysicist Vincent Courtillot discusses why the Earth's magnetic field occasionally flips...

When a Mars-size object collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, it knocked off a chunk that would become the moon. It also tilted Earth sideways a bit, so that our planet now orbits the sun on a slant.

An international team of researchers, with the participation of IAC astronomers, has discovered that the chemical structure of Earth-like planets can be very different from the bulk composition of the Earth.

Formations in the Channeled Scablands have helped scientists understand the forces that shape planets. Now NASA interns are applying those lessons to what we know of Mars.

IT SOMETIMES feels as though some months go by faster than others, but November 2009 really did. Events in the Southern Ocean conspired to make the Earth spin ever-so-slightly faster, shortening half of the days in the month by 0.1 milliseconds each.

The Earth has been covered by giant combinations of continents, called supercontinents, many times in its past, and it will be again one day in the distant future.

Geophysicists want to use neutrinos to 'x-ray' the Earth, a technique that could reveal undiscovered oil fields. But how practical is such a scheme?

German geologists from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne have demonstrated new scientific results in the April issue of the scholarly journal Geology, which provide a new theory on the earliest phase of continental formation.

Swiss scientists have for the first time succeeded in realistically simulating how an oceanic plate sinks of its own accord under an adjacent plate.

University of Manchester mathematicians have developed the theory for a Harry Potter style 'cloaking' device which could protect buildings from earthquakes.

From high above the Florida Panhandle, the Apalachicola Bluffs -- a winding system of steep ravines -- look like the branching veins of a leaf.