#genesis-magma

#genesis-magma

Amber lava exploded over 200 meters into the air as Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes, erupted on Thursday. Lava fountains began to erupt from the volcano after 11 am local time.

'Due to its extent and location it is clear that this is in fact the same magma reservoir as in the previous eruption,' geophysicist Professor Seama Nobukazu said.

The remote military range near the town of Tonopah is not primarily used for nuclear detonations, but it has long been linked to US nuclear weapons programs. The site is used to test how nuclear weapons would be delivered, including experiments where aircraft drop non-nuclear versions of bombs to study their performance.

Land is one of those things that can disappear even as you see it. It falls away beneath you, becoming merely the ground under your feet, because you're thinking about where you're going, or a place slowly blurring out of focus from the airplane window. Land is a primal word, primordial even, like lava. And it is a loaded word if, say, you're Indigenous or descend from a people whose land was taken from them.

The fragile-looking filaments of cooled lava known as Pele's hair can form when pockets of bubble-rich lava pull apart rapidly, experiments suggest.

Remembering the life and work of the geologist George Poulett Scrope, and salmon stories in this week's pick from the Nature archive.

A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet's magnetic field for the past 265 million years. These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet's most enormous and enigmatic objects. Current estimates calculate that each one is comparable in size to the African continent, although they remain buried at a depth of 2,900 kilometers.

Although Kansas has no active volcanoes, the region marks the southern reach of the Midcontinent Rift System, a massive tectonic event that nearly split North America apart in Earth's distant past. When magma forced its way through the crust during that period, it left behind hardened igneous rock and deep fractures that remain buried thousands of feet underground.

Recent examination of some ancient rocks from the west coast of Scotland have now overturned that thinking, suggesting there were periods during snowball Earth when the climate woke up. Close-up views of thin, repeating rock layers known as varves, each thought to represent a single year of sedimentation during the snowball Earth period.