Tag: Earth

Continent-size islands deep inside Earth’s mantle could be more than a billion years old, a new study finds. Known as large low-seismic-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), these blobs are both hotter and older than nearby areas of the mantle. The findings, published Jan. 22 in the journal Nature, shed light on Earth’s deep interior and could help explain how the mantle moves over time. Scientists have known about these LLSVPs for a few decades. The two giant blobs — one beneath the Pacific Ocean and one beneath Africa — lie at the…

The world’s largest iceberg, A23a, is drifting toward South Georgia Island, a remote and ecologically vital wildlife haven. This massive block of ice, about the size of Rhode Island, poses a significant threat to the delicate ecosystem of the island, home to penguins and seals. Satellite images, including recent data captured by NOAA’s GOES East satellite on Jan. 22, 2025, are closely monitoring the iceberg’s slow journey through the Southern Ocean, where it could soon reach the shallow waters surrounding South Georgia. Breaking free Iceberg A23a has been a concern…

Japanese scientists have created the first-ever long-term dataset about Earth’s entire atmosphere, stretching all the way to space. They hope the project will help shed light on some little-explored processes taking place inside our planet’s gaseous shroud, including the magnificent northern lights. Some parts of Earth’s atmosphere are studied continuously in incredible detail. For example, millions of weather stations all around the world, hundreds of meteorological balloons and countless airplanes provide daily measurements of the entire troposphere, the atmosphere’s lowest region. The balloons also reach the lower part of the…

Potential patches of Earth’s ancient crust, sometimes called “sunken worlds,” may have just been discovered deep within the mantle, thanks to a new way of mapping the inside of our planet. However, these mysterious blobs appear in places they should not, leaving researchers scratching their heads. For decades, scientists have been building up a better picture of Earth’s interior by using seismographs — 3D images created by measuring how seismic waves from earthquakes reverberate deep within our planet. This method has helped scientists identify ancient sections of the planet’s crust,…

We like to think of land as a fairly static thing, considering that’s where we spend the majority of our lives. And to think that the ground is ever-changing, well, that’s a bit unsettling. But the reality is land is always changing — perhaps nowhere more so than at the Kumani Bank mud volcano, also known as Chigil-Deniz, some 15 miles (25 km) off the coast of Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea. The NASA Earth Observatory has released a series of images taken with the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and…