PCC STEM's Posts

Scientists have discovered melt-glass material in a thin layer of sedimentary rock in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Syria. According to the researchers, the material -- which dates back nearly 13,000 years -- was formed at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200 degrees Celsius (3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit), and is the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.
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A team of scientists that last year created waves by correctly forecasting the 2011 eruption of Axial Seamount years in advance now says that the undersea volcano located some 250 miles off the Oregon coast gave off clear signals hours before its impending eruption.
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A geoengineering solution to climate change could lead to significant rainfall reduction in Europe and North America, a team of European scientists concludes. The researchers studied how models of the Earth in a warm, CO2-rich world respond to an artificial reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface.
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Scientists have reached a milestone in describing how the northern lights work by way of a process called "magnetic reconnection." The process is best imagined as untangling twisted strands of spaghetti.
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The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully shed light on processes up to three billion years ago, the theory isn't sufficient in explaining the dynamics of Earth and crust formation before that point and through to the earliest formation of planet, some 4.6 billion years ago.
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The depths of Earth are anything but peaceful: large quantities of liquids carve their way through the rock as fluids, causing magma to form. Scientists have now shown that the fluids flow a lot faster through solid rock than previously assumed.
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Super-eruptions are potentially civilization-ending events and new research suggests that they may have surprisingly short fuses.
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New research shows some of the steepest mountain slopes in the world got that way because of the interplay between terrain uplift associated with plate tectonics and powerful streams cutting into hillsides, leading to large landslides.
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More than 2 billion years ago, a much fainter sun should have left the Earth as an orbiting ice ball. Why we avoided the deep freeze is a question that has puzzled scientists, but one astronomer might have an answer.
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New research studies indicate that the Santa Cruz region produces large earthquakes more frequently than previously thought.
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