Scienceblogtwo

Rarely do we learn something that substantially alters the way we perceive the world. However, a similar realization has now come to Matthew Jackson, an earth scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the thousands of volcanologists throughout the world. In the two centuries that scientists have been studying volcanoes, Jackson and his colleagues discovered a process that was significantly more active than anyone had anticipated while sampling magma from the Icelandic Fagradalsfjall volcano. "We receive a tremendous surprise just when I believe we've gotten close to understanding how these volcanoes work," he added. A tuya volcano called Fagradalsfjall was created during the Last Glacial Period on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, around 25 miles (40 km) from Reykjavk. Jackson was in the right place at the right time to see the formation of Fagradalsfjall, a fissure in the lowlands of southwest Iceland that split and erupted with magma in March 2021, ...

Lasers make it possible to locate old crust. Using lasers smaller than a human hair to target miniscule grains of a mineral recovered from beach sand, Curtin University researchers have found evidence of an approximately four billion-year-old section of the Earth's crust that resides beneath the South-West of Western Australia. The zircon mineral was used, and the lasers were used to vaporize portions of individual grains in order to reveal where the grains were originally eroded from as well as the geological history of the area, according to the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group at Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, led by Ph.D. candidate Maximilian Droellner. This new finding contributes to our understanding of how the planet changed from being inhospitable to supporting life. According to Mr. Droellner, "There is evidence that a chunk of crust up to four billion years old, roughly the size of Ireland, has been affecting the geological evolution of WA fo...