All posts tagged: Geology

New PACA mapping tool tracks fossil locations back through millions of years

New PACA mapping tool tracks fossil locations back through millions of years

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Paleocoordinates Calculator, or PACA, lets users reconstruct ancient fossil locations from modern coordinates and geological ages without coding or desktop software. The web tool compares results from five established global plate models and measures how much their predictions differ. PACA displays reconstructed points in tables and on interactive 3D paleogeographic globes, with export options for further analysis. Validation across 142 reconstructions showed near-perfect agreement with GPlates desktop software, with median spatial errors below 17 metres. Fossils are often discovered in one place but formed in another, carried across the planet by tectonic plates over millions of years. Reconstructing that earlier location usually demands specialist software, model knowledge and careful handling of geological data. The Paleocoordinates Calculator, known as PACA, converts present-day fossil coordinates into estimated positions from deep time. Users can upload a CSV file containing modern longitude, latitude and geological age, then receive reconstructed paleocoordinates within seconds. The BIOST3 Research Group developed the tool and described it in the journal Scientific Reports. The team included Noa Scholz-Murcia, Alejandro Rodríguez-Mena, Víctor Madarnás-Gómez and Antonio …

Why Antarctica turned into an ice world millions of years before the Arctic

Why Antarctica turned into an ice world millions of years before the Arctic

Published by Jenni Sidey

Thirty million years separate the freezing of Antarctica from the glaciation of the Arctic, and for decades that gap made little sense. If falling carbon dioxide levels drove the planet into an ice age, both poles should have felt it around the same time. Instead, a vast ice sheet smothered the southern continent while the north remained largely open water and bare land. The answer, according to a new international study published in Science, was never primarily about the atmosphere. It was about the ground beneath Antarctica itself. A team led by researchers at the University of Southampton found that slow-moving waves of energy deep within Earth’s mantle gradually pushed large sections of East Antarctica skyward over roughly 100 million years, building the elevated terrain that snow and ice needed to take permanent hold. The process began when Antarctica and Africa started splitting apart during the Jurassic Period, and its consequences did not fully play out until the continent plunged into glaciation 34 million years ago. Antarctica’s fast-moving Byrd Glacier courses through the Transantarctic Mountains, …

Myanmar’s deadliest earthquake results in 500 km rupture and signs of a rare supershear break

Myanmar’s deadliest earthquake results in 500 km rupture and signs of a rare supershear break

Published by Jenni Sidey

Myanmar’s March 28, 2025 earthquake did not just shake the ground around Mandalay, it ripped across the country on a scale that seismologists rarely get to study in such detail. The magnitude 7.7 quake killed thousands of people, injured more than 11,000, and damaged homes, roads, and critical infrastructure across a wide stretch of central Myanmar. Now a new analysis in Geodesy and Geodynamics shows that the destruction was tied to a long, shallow, fast-moving rupture along the Sagaing Fault, one of Southeast Asia’s most active fault systems. Using satellite radar and pixel offset tracking, researchers mapped how the ground shifted during the quake and built models of the slip along the fault. They found that the rupture stretched about 500 kilometers, making it one of the longest documented strike-slip surface ruptures of its kind. The event was dominated by horizontal motion, with most of the slip concentrated in the upper 12 kilometers of the crust. That matters because shallow ruptures are often more dangerous at the surface, where people, buildings, roads, and utilities are …

Water seeping into Earth’s mantle 3.1 billion years ago fueled early volcanic activity and plate tectonics

Water seeping into Earth’s mantle 3.1 billion years ago fueled early volcanic activity and plate tectonics

Published by Jenni Sidey

Water may have been shaping Earth’s deep interior far earlier than many geologists thought. In rocks more than 3 billion years old from Western Australia, a research team found chemical signs that water had already travelled down into the mantle, where it helped generate magma and fuel volcanic activity. That matters because the modern planet depends on this kind of deep recycling. Today, water is dragged into the mantle at subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another. The process helps drive volcanism, build continents and regulate chemical cycles tied to habitability. But whether anything similar could happen on the much hotter early Earth has remained a stubborn question. The new evidence comes from the Whundo Group in the Pilbara Craton, one of the rare places where very old crust is still well preserved. The rocks formed about 3.13 billion to 3.10 billion years ago, and the team says they preserve an unusually clear record of how magma formed in a young planet that did not yet operate like the Earth of today. “These …

A volcano has erupted remnants of Earth’s primordial magma ocean

A volcano has erupted remnants of Earth’s primordial magma ocean

Published by skeptic

Submarine reliefs produced by a survey off the coast of Mayotte in 2019, showing the new underwater volcano Fani Maoré Campagne MAYOBS2 A rising underwater volcano off the coast of Madagascar has been spewing up chemical traces of material from a primordial magma ocean in the first 100 million years of Earth’s history. Scientists generally suspect that Earth’s mantle – the thick layer of hot rock beneath the crust – has been steadily churning for more than 4 billion years, gradually erasing most chemical traces of the planet’s earliest history. “This is going to change a lot of things [in earth science], because now we have proof that materials dating back 4.5 billion years – from the very beginning of Earth’s history – still exist in sufficient quantities to be sampled in a volcano,” says Catherine Chauvel at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. During the Hadean eon, a Mars-sized object collided with Earth, breaking off debris that scientists believe later formed the moon. The impact heated the young planet so …

See Why the Venezuela Earthquakes Were So Deadly

See Why the Venezuela Earthquakes Were So Deadly

Published by Sam Flores

The moment the quake struck the coastal region of Caraballeda, Venezuela. @neracosu via TikTok Any large earthquake can be dangerous, but the residents of Caracas and Venezuelan coastal cities like La Guaira and Catia La Mar were victims of several unlucky factors. Two quakes in rapid succession, a fault that ruptured toward more populated areas, soft ground and the shallow depth of the temblors all combined to make the June 24 disaster especially severe, even for areas that were miles away from the epicenter. Here is what made it so deadly. The “doublet” First, and most important: there was not one earthquake but two, separated by just 39 seconds. Seismologists call this a “doublet.” The first was smaller measuring 7.2 in magnitude; the second was much more powerful, measuring 7.5. The doublet meant that buildings had to withstand chaotic shaking for far longer than they would have in an ordinary earthquake. “Almost certainly, what happened was that the first earthquake triggered the second one,” said David Oglesby, a professor of geophysics at the University of …

Space Lasers Show How Venezuela’s Earthquakes Reshaped the Earth’s Crust

Space Lasers Show How Venezuela’s Earthquakes Reshaped the Earth’s Crust

Published by skeptic

The European Space Agency released a satellite image that shows the upheaval left behind by the pair of earthquakes that rocked Venezuela last week. The image was created using observations from the Sentinel-1 satellites, which are part of the European Copernicus program. These satellites do not take conventional photographs; instead, they use their radars to “illuminate” the Earth’s surface and record the time it takes for the signal to return to the sensor. By comparing two measurements of the same location taken on different dates, scientists can determine whether the ground has shifted, even when that shift is too small to be seen with the naked eye. To create the map, scientists compared an observation taken on June 18—one week before the earthquakes—with another taken on June 25, the day after the pair of earthquakes that were mangitude 7.2 and 7.5 respectively. This comparison allowed them to construct what’s known as an interferogram revealing how much the ground deformed following the event. This satellite image shows the area around Caracas, Venezuela, which was struck by …

Venezuela Earthquake Destruction Revealed in New Satellite Images

Venezuela Earthquake Destruction Revealed in New Satellite Images

Published by skeptic

Satellite Technology Is being used to streamline rescue efforts in Venezuela following the two earthquakes that struck on June 24. Space agencies have shared images with emergency authorities and the Venezuelan government that not only reveal the magnitude of the disaster but also allow response teams to identify where to focus their efforts—and the challenges on the ground. Following the twin earthquakes in Venezuela, the Copernicus satellite system activated its emergency mapping mode at the request of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations. Using imagery collected by Sentinel satellites and sensors, the system has generated 10 products and 25 maps that enable real-time assessment of the extent of damage and how terrain has shifted in 13 areas of interest. In addition, these tools have helped officials identify clear areas that can be used for landing aircraft involved in rescue operations and the delivery of humanitarian aid. Initial data from Copernicus shows severe damage in the cities of La Guaira and Greater Caracas, as well as impacts on communities in Aragua, …

Why Venezuela’s Second Earthquake Was So Damaging to Buildings

Why Venezuela’s Second Earthquake Was So Damaging to Buildings

Published by skeptic

Verónica Cañas barely had time to grab her 6-year-old son and put on her shoes before running out of her apartment in Caracas. As she ran down the stairs, the walls began to crack and part of the facade started to crumble. A few kilometers away in Altamira, 50-year-old Eduardo Burger watched as one building swayed while another fell apart. Neither of them knew that this was not just a single terrible earthquake but instead a rare phenomenon. On June 24, Venezuela experienced a seismic doublet that saw earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 occur just 39 seconds apart. The first tremor occurred with its epicenter in Yaracuy. Just a few seconds later, an even more intense earthquake shook the same region again. Both occurred at a shallow depth of between 10 and 20 kilometers (6 and 12 miles), which caused the energy to reach the surface with greater intensity and allowed the seismic waves to be felt as far away as Colombia, northern Brazil, and several Caribbean islands such as Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. …

Venezuela’s Powerful Earthquakes Were a Rare ‘Seismic Doublet’

Venezuela’s Powerful Earthquakes Were a Rare ‘Seismic Doublet’

Published by skeptic

Venezuela declared a national emergency following two earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude that occurred just 39 seconds apart on Wednesday. This phenomenon, known as a seismic doublet, is rare. However, there are documented cases in various regions of the world that continue to be studied to expand our understanding of the mechanisms of stress is transferred within the Earth’s crust and the interaction between geological faults. The US Geological Survey reported that both earthquakes had their epicenters northwest of the town of Yumare, near the city of Morón and about 160 kilometers (99 miles) west of the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. The quakes occurred at depths of 20.3 and 10 kilometers and were felt across much of northern Venezuela and in several Caribbean countries. The sequence was classified as a severe seismic doublet, a phenomenon that occurs when two earthquakes of similar magnitude strike almost simultaneously in nearby areas. According to USGS estimates, the probability that an earthquake will be followed by another of greater magnitude in a nearby area within a week is …