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Scientists from the Ocean University of China have reconstructed Earth’s plate tectonics over the past 1.8 billion years.
They’ve condensed this vast timeline into an animation just one minute long! The animation showcases the movement of continents over nearly half of our planet’s history.
Around 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Gondwana merged with North America, Europe, and Northern Asia to form the supercontinent Pangaea. Both Pangaea and Gondwana were composed of even older tectonic plates. The reconstruction then reveals the even earlier supercontinent Rodinia, which formed from the ancient supercontinent Nuna around 1.35 billion years ago.
#Science #Geology #PlateTectonics
They’ve condensed this vast timeline into an animation just one minute long! The animation showcases the movement of continents over nearly half of our planet’s history.
Around 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Gondwana merged with North America, Europe, and Northern Asia to form the supercontinent Pangaea. Both Pangaea and Gondwana were composed of even older tectonic plates. The reconstruction then reveals the even earlier supercontinent Rodinia, which formed from the ancient supercontinent Nuna around 1.35 billion years ago.
#Science #Geology #PlateTectonics
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Dallol Volcano: Earth’s Alien Landscape
Step into an otherworldly scene at Dallol volcano in Ethiopia, often compared to Jupiter’s moon Io! This isn’t just any volcano; it’s the lowest terrestrial volcano on Earth, with its crater sitting 48 meters below sea level.
Formed by a phreatic explosion in 1926, the Dallol lake is a spectacle of purple-yellow, highly saline, magnesium-rich water, reaching a scorching 110°C (230°F)! The surrounding area is adorned with coral-like mineral deposits and acidic brine pools in a stunning array of colors – from deep blue to vibrant yellow and orange. These vivid hues come from sulfur, metal oxides, and potassium and fluorine impurities.
Dallol holds the record for the highest average annual temperature on Earth (34.7°C / 94.5°F) and is one of the planet’s driest places, with virtually no rainfall. What’s even more astonishing? Despite extensive research, no signs of life – not even resilient microorganisms – have been found here. It’s a truly barren, yet breathtaking, environment!
#Dallol #Volcano #Ethiopia #Science #Geology #AlienLandscape #EarthScience #NaturalWonders #Extremophiles #Jupiter #Io
Step into an otherworldly scene at Dallol volcano in Ethiopia, often compared to Jupiter’s moon Io! This isn’t just any volcano; it’s the lowest terrestrial volcano on Earth, with its crater sitting 48 meters below sea level.
Formed by a phreatic explosion in 1926, the Dallol lake is a spectacle of purple-yellow, highly saline, magnesium-rich water, reaching a scorching 110°C (230°F)! The surrounding area is adorned with coral-like mineral deposits and acidic brine pools in a stunning array of colors – from deep blue to vibrant yellow and orange. These vivid hues come from sulfur, metal oxides, and potassium and fluorine impurities.
Dallol holds the record for the highest average annual temperature on Earth (34.7°C / 94.5°F) and is one of the planet’s driest places, with virtually no rainfall. What’s even more astonishing? Despite extensive research, no signs of life – not even resilient microorganisms – have been found here. It’s a truly barren, yet breathtaking, environment!
#Dallol #Volcano #Ethiopia #Science #Geology #AlienLandscape #EarthScience #NaturalWonders #Extremophiles #Jupiter #Io
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🌋 Yellowstone May Not Be Powered by a Deep Mantle Plume After All
Yellowstone is one of Earth’s most famous supervolcanoes — and for decades, many geologists explained it with a familiar image: a deep mantle plume, a vertical column of hot rock rising from near Earth’s core, similar to the plume that built Hawaii.
A new study in Science suggests a very different mechanism.
Researchers built a high-resolution 3D geodynamic model of western North America and found that Yellowstone’s magma may be supplied not by a deep plume, but by the shallow asthenosphere — the hot, slowly flowing layer of mantle just beneath the rigid lithosphere.
The driver is what the authors call an eastward “mantle wind”: a broad horizontal flow of hot rock moving beneath North America at geologic speeds.
This flow appears to be linked to the ancient Farallon Plate, which began sliding beneath North America tens of millions of years ago. Remnants of that plate still sit deep under the continent. As they continue to sink, they help generate a large-scale mantle flow that pushes hot asthenospheric material toward Yellowstone.
Then comes the key part: as this buoyant material is forced beneath the thick continental lithosphere, the stretching and pressure changes trigger decompression melting — producing magma without requiring a deep plume rising from the core-mantle boundary.
The model also helps explain Yellowstone’s unusual underground plumbing. Competing tectonic forces appear to tear the lithosphere beneath the region, creating a southwest-dipping channel. This channel acts like a pathway for magma to rise, spread and evolve into a vast “magma mush” system rather than a simple, long-lived liquid magma chamber.
Why it matters: supereruptions can eject more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material, blanket huge regions in ash and affect climate for years. Understanding what actually sustains systems like Yellowstone is crucial for long-term volcanic hazard models.
The big takeaway: Yellowstone may be less like a blowtorch from Earth’s deep interior — and more like a tectonic wound kept active by the slow, hidden motion of an ancient plate.
Source:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady2027
Readable summary:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260622014317.htm
#Yellowstone #Supervolcano #Geology #EarthScience #Science
Yellowstone is one of Earth’s most famous supervolcanoes — and for decades, many geologists explained it with a familiar image: a deep mantle plume, a vertical column of hot rock rising from near Earth’s core, similar to the plume that built Hawaii.
A new study in Science suggests a very different mechanism.
Researchers built a high-resolution 3D geodynamic model of western North America and found that Yellowstone’s magma may be supplied not by a deep plume, but by the shallow asthenosphere — the hot, slowly flowing layer of mantle just beneath the rigid lithosphere.
The driver is what the authors call an eastward “mantle wind”: a broad horizontal flow of hot rock moving beneath North America at geologic speeds.
This flow appears to be linked to the ancient Farallon Plate, which began sliding beneath North America tens of millions of years ago. Remnants of that plate still sit deep under the continent. As they continue to sink, they help generate a large-scale mantle flow that pushes hot asthenospheric material toward Yellowstone.
Then comes the key part: as this buoyant material is forced beneath the thick continental lithosphere, the stretching and pressure changes trigger decompression melting — producing magma without requiring a deep plume rising from the core-mantle boundary.
The model also helps explain Yellowstone’s unusual underground plumbing. Competing tectonic forces appear to tear the lithosphere beneath the region, creating a southwest-dipping channel. This channel acts like a pathway for magma to rise, spread and evolve into a vast “magma mush” system rather than a simple, long-lived liquid magma chamber.
Why it matters: supereruptions can eject more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material, blanket huge regions in ash and affect climate for years. Understanding what actually sustains systems like Yellowstone is crucial for long-term volcanic hazard models.
The big takeaway: Yellowstone may be less like a blowtorch from Earth’s deep interior — and more like a tectonic wound kept active by the slow, hidden motion of an ancient plate.
Source:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady2027
Readable summary:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260622014317.htm
#Yellowstone #Supervolcano #Geology #EarthScience #Science
Science
Tectonic origin of Yellowstone’s translithospheric magma plumbing system
Yellowstone is widely recognized for its crustal magma reservoirs replenished by asthenospheric melts. However, how primary melts traverse the rigid lithosphere and evolve into bimodal volcanism remains unclear. By leveraging multidisciplinary ...
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🔴 A Rock From Mars Just Filled a 2-Billion-Year Hole in the Planet’s History
Scientists have dated an unusual Martian meteorite to 1.273 billion years old — placing it almost exactly inside a huge missing chapter in our geological record of Mars.
The meteorite, called NWA 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019. Most Martian volcanic meteorites of its type are either younger than about 600 million years or around 2.4 billion years old. Until now, researchers had essentially no samples from the enormous interval between them.
But its age may not even be the strangest part. The rock’s neodymium isotopes suggest that the magma it formed from came from a portion of the Martian mantle that had remained remarkably untouched since the earliest days of the Solar System. Mars formed very quickly and, unlike Earth, has no active plate tectonics constantly remixing its interior — potentially allowing ancient chemical reservoirs to survive for billions of years.
In other words, a small rock blasted off Mars by an impact and eventually found in the Sahara may contain a chemical fingerprint preserved from almost the beginning of the planet itself.
How much of Mars’s earliest history could still be locked inside rocks already lying somewhere on Earth?
#Mars #Space #Meteorite #PlanetaryScience #Geology #Science
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2026.06.035
Scientists have dated an unusual Martian meteorite to 1.273 billion years old — placing it almost exactly inside a huge missing chapter in our geological record of Mars.
The meteorite, called NWA 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019. Most Martian volcanic meteorites of its type are either younger than about 600 million years or around 2.4 billion years old. Until now, researchers had essentially no samples from the enormous interval between them.
But its age may not even be the strangest part. The rock’s neodymium isotopes suggest that the magma it formed from came from a portion of the Martian mantle that had remained remarkably untouched since the earliest days of the Solar System. Mars formed very quickly and, unlike Earth, has no active plate tectonics constantly remixing its interior — potentially allowing ancient chemical reservoirs to survive for billions of years.
In other words, a small rock blasted off Mars by an impact and eventually found in the Sahara may contain a chemical fingerprint preserved from almost the beginning of the planet itself.
How much of Mars’s earliest history could still be locked inside rocks already lying somewhere on Earth?
#Mars #Space #Meteorite #PlanetaryScience #Geology #Science
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2026.06.035
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