Geology

New MIT research provides insights into the composition, thermal state, and evolution of Earth's mantle.

Understanding the Earth under Hawaii

Study finds lateral variations in composition at a key depth below the island hotspot, provides scientists a new understanding of mantle mixing.

March 28, 2018

Researchers at MIT and the Australian National University have found that seismic waves are essentially blind to a very common substance found throughout the Earth's interior: water.

Scientists find seismic imaging is blind to water

Findings may lead scientists to reinterpret seismic maps of the Earth's interior.

March 14, 2018

Associate Professor Ruben Juanes (left) and students (l-r) Lubna Barghouty, Yunteng Cao, and Ehsan Haghighat discuss the impact of wettability on the patterns of fluid invasion into a porous microfluidic chip, illuminated from below and recorded with a high-speed camera from above.

Show the flow

A novel hand-held laboratory reveals hidden subterranean fluid movement.

November 17, 2017

“This is not saying that disaster occurs the next day,” says Professor Daniel Rothman about his new study. “It’s saying that, if left unchecked, the carbon cycle would move into a realm which would be no longer stable, and would behave in a way that would be difficult to predict. In the geologic past, this type of behavior is associated with mass extinction.”

Mathematics predicts a sixth mass extinction

By 2100, oceans may hold enough carbon to launch mass extermination of species in future millennia.

September 20, 2017

Alison Criscitiello PhD '14 summits Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain, in May 2016 after ice coring nearby in the Yukon Territory.

For the love of ice: Journeys to the remote and inhospitable

Alison Criscitiello PhD '14 seeks ice cores in inhospitable locations, sometimes camping on ice sheets and sleeping with a shotgun in case of bear attacks.

August 23, 2017

New findings suggest the ancient Earth harbored a mantle that was much more efficient at drawing down pieces of the planet’s crust.

Ancient Earth’s hot interior created “graveyard” of continental slabs

Higher mantle temperatures caused subducting tectonic plates to sink much further than they do today.

August 22, 2017

New measurements of lunar rocks have demonstrated that the ancient moon generated a dynamo magnetic field in its liquid metallic core (innermost red shell). The results raise the possibility of two different mechanisms — one that may have driven an earlier, much stronger dynamo, and a second that kept the moon’s core simmering at a much slower boil toward the end of its lifetime.

Lunar dynamo’s lifetime extended by at least 1 billion years

Findings suggest two mechanisms may have powered the moon’s ancient churning, molten core.

August 9, 2017

Geologists report that about 251.9 million years ago, a huge pulse of magma rose up through the Earth, in a region that today is known as the Siberian Traps.

Underground magma pulse triggered end-Permian extinction

Study ties specific interval during an extended period of volcanism to Earth’s most severe mass extinction.

July 31, 2017

Left to right: River networks on Mars, Earth, and Titan. Researchers report that Titan, like Mars but unlike Earth, has not undergone any active plate tectonics in its recent past.

Rivers on three worlds tell different tales

Study finds history of Titan’s landscape resembles that of Mars, not Earth

May 18, 2017

MIT teaching assistant Marjorie Cantine lands a drone in Death Valley.

Classroom Earth: Drones over the desert

Professor Kristin Bergmann and her class used innovative technology to explore the sedimentary history of the Carrara Formation in California's Death Valley.

May 16, 2017