geology

Scientists are exploring deep underground mines to study 'dark oxygen,' free oxygen found far from sunlight, which may play an unrecognized role in powering subsurface microbial life.

A new study using high-resolution lake sediment records from Lake Chala suggests the Mount Toba eruption 74,000 years ago caused only about half a degree of cooling for under two years, contradicting theories of a near-extinction volcanic winter.

LithoFormer is a Seq2Seq transformer framework for stratigraphic inference from well logs, using a PatchTST backbone with rotary positional embeddings and a multi-task head to jointly predict geological zonation and boundaries, achieving a 90% reduction in boundary error and eliminating stratigraphic order violations.

The Silurian Hypothesis explores the possibility of detecting an ancient industrial civilization in the geological record, raising questions about deep-time archaeology and planetary-scale signatures.

This paper presents the geological and geophysical characterization of two exploration boreholes in the Rhenish Lignite Mining Area, Germany, as part of initial efforts to assess medium-deep and deep geothermal reservoirs as a renewable heat source to replace the Weisweiler coal power plant.

A newly installed monitoring system on the seafloor of the Amsterdam-Saint Paul Plateau captured a sudden burst of crustal spreading, revealing that most extension occurred in a short time window and some events lacked seismic activity.

A new study suggests that intense asteroid bombardment during the Hadean eon kept Earth's early crust hot and thin, enabling the formation of the first continental crust. Geologist Tim Johnson argues that impacts from space, not just internal heat, explain the missing 500 million years of geological record.

Satellite interferometry from ESA's Sentinel-1 shows ground displacement up to 30 centimeters after Venezuela's twin earthquakes, revealing deformation along the San Sebastián fault system.

Venezuela experienced a rare seismic doublet with two powerful earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude occurring 39 seconds apart, causing a national emergency. The phenomenon involves stress transfer between faults and has been studied in other regions such as Turkey and Syria.

This paper presents Geo-Strat-RL, a synthetic environment that uses reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to train vision-language models to reason about geological event histories from stratigraphic diagrams and seismic data, demonstrating improved reconstruction and cross-domain transfer.

Scientists have located the path of the Colorado River during a 5-million-year disappearance from the geological record.