Researchers have made a breakthrough discovery that changes our understanding of Earth's early geological history, challenging beliefs about how our continents formed and when plate tectonics began.

A study published today in Nature reveals that Earth's first crust, formed about 4.5 billion years ago, probably had chemical features remarkably like today's continental crust.
This suggests the distinctive chemical signature of our continents was established at the very beginning of Earth's history.

Professor Emeritus Simon Turner from the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Macquarie University led the study, which included researchers from around Australia and the UK and France.

"This discovery has major implications for how we think about Earth's earliest history," says Professor Turner.

"Scientists have long thought that tectonic plates needed to dive beneath each other to create the chemical fingerprint we see in continents.

"Our research shows this fingerprint existed in Earth's very first crust, the protocrust - meaning those theories need to be reconsidered."

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the influence of the forces exerted by the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq on how much the surface of the Earth has bent over the last 20 million years. Their research revealed that in the present day, deep below the Earth's surface, the Neotethys oceanic plate - the ocean floor that used to be between the Arabian and Eurasian continents - is breaking off horizontally, with a tear progressively lengthening from southeast Turkey to northwest Iran. Their findings show how the evolution of the Earth's surface is controlled by processes deep within the planet's interior. The research was published in the journal Solid Earth.

When two continents converge over millions of years, the oceanic floor between them slides to great depths beneath the continents. Eventually, the continents collide, and masses of rock from their edges are lifted up into towering mountain ranges. Over millions of years, the immense weight of these mountains causes the Earth's surface around them to bend downward. Over time, sediments eroded from the mountains accumulate in this depression, forming plains such as Mesopotamia in the Middle East. The researchers modelled the downward bend of the Earth's surfaces based on the Zagros Mountain's load where the Arabian continent is colliding with Eurasia. They combined the resulting size of the depression with the computed topography based on the Earth's mantle to reproduce the unusually deep depression in the southeastern segment of the study area. The researchers found that the weight of the mountains alone cannot account for the 3-4 km deep depression that has formed and been filled with sediment over the past 15 million years.

New research by Dr. Bellut-Staeck in the journal Medical Research and Its Applications suggests chronic infrasound exposure can lead to serious blood vessel problems. This underpins earlier literature that have reached the similar conclusions.

But the government refuses to accept the results.

Wind turbines are known to disrupt wildlife and severely damage the surrounding biotope, And, despite being inaudible, it is known that low-frequency vibrations from wind turbines can be harmful to human health.

Hat-tip: Tichy's Einblick here.

Humans can only perceive sound waves over a range of approximately between 20 and 20,000 Hertz. Sound waves below 20 Hz cannot be heard by humans and are called infrasound.

Natural infrasound emitted by nature is harmless but it is increasingly being understood that infra-sound generated by wind turbines pulsates and make people who are subjected to them over extended time periods sick.

Dramatic cliffs and high plateaus are caused by the same wave triggered in Earth's middle layer when continents pull apart, a new study finds.
High plateaus rise in the interior of continents thanks to churning deep inside Earth hundreds of miles from where they eventually spring up, new research suggests.

As continents break up, massive cliff walls may rise near the boundaries where the crust is pulling apart. That breakup sets off a wave in Earth's middle layer, the mantle, that slowly rolls inward over tens of millions of years, fueling the rise of plateaus, the new study found.

Scientists have long known that continental rifts triggered the rise of massive escarpments, like the cliff walls that separate the East African Rift Valley from the Ethiopian plateau, said lead author Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. And these steep cliffs sometimes fringe inland plateaus that rise from the strong, stable cores of continents, known as cratons.

But because these two landscape features usually form tens of millions to up to 100 million years apart, many scientists thought the different formations were driven by different processes, Gernon told Live Science in an email.

A paper published in March of 2021 in the journal Science Advances reports on the discovery of evidence for a large airburst type impact within the SØr Rondane Mountains, Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. The report bears the names of a 15-member international team that did the research. The lead author was M. Van Ginneken with the Belgian Geological Survey. In the first sentence of the abstract to the article the authors support something I have been saying for literally decades: "Large airbursts, the most frequent hazardous impact events, are estimated to occur orders of magnitude more frequently than crater-forming impacts."

This fact is confirmed simply because airbursts don't leave impact craters. In this case the fingerprints of the event took the form of condensation spherules resulting from "a touchdown event, in which a projectile vapor jet interacts with the Antarctic ice sheet." The authors go on to explain that "Finding evidence of these low-altitude meteoritic events thus remains critical to understanding the impact history of Earth and estimating hazardous effects of asteroid impacts." They further report that "In recent years, meteoritic ablation debris resulting from airburst events have been found in three different locations of Antarctica. The material . . . all appears to have been produced during a Tunguska-like airburst event 480 thousand years (ka) ago."

With respect to their research, they say: "Here, we present the discovery of extraterrestrial particles formed during a significantly larger event recovered on . . . Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. The characteristic features of the recovered particles attest to an unusual type of touchdown event, intermediate between an airburst and a crater-forming impact, during which the high-velocity vapor jet produced by the total disruption of an asteroid reached the Antarctic ice sheet." This event was estimated by the team to have occurred about 430 thousand years ago.

The authors provide some critical perspective on the effects of these type of impacts:

"The impact hazards resulting form the atmospheric entry of an asteroid that are currently being addressed by impact mitigation programs depend mainly on whether the impactor reaches the ground or is entirely disrupted in the atmosphere (i.e., airburst). For small-to medium-sized impactors (50- to 150-m diameter) producing airbursts, the main hazard is limited to blast effects resulting in strong overpressures over areas of up to 100,000 km2 wide. [38,600 sq miles] Thermal radiation may also result in fires over an area of 10 to 1000 km2 wide. . . . in addition to shockwaves and thermal radiation covering the aforementioned areas, these events are potentially destructive over a large area, corresponding to the area of interaction between the hot jet and the ground. The authors point out that such an event over Antarctica would inject ice crystals and impact dust into the upper atmosphere but would not directly affect human activity. However, they explain that "if a touchdown impact event takes place above a densely populated area, this would result in millions of casualties and severe damages over distances of up to hundreds of kilometers."

Now comes a new report in Earth and Planetary Science Letters on the discovery of evidence for yet another airburst event over Antarctica. The 11-member team responsible for the report is comprised of geologists, astrophysicists, and archaeologists from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Belgium, Russia, Japan, France and Italy.

Last month, in the February 2024 issue of the Kosmographia Newsletter I reported on new research correlating a series of large-scale igneous events which produced the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) and the Siberian Traps with mass extinction episodes. On February 8 another paper was published in the journal Global and Planetary Change which further supports correlations between mass extinction episodes with gigantic volcanic eruptions and catastrophic cosmic impacts. The lead author of the paper is Michael Rampino, who has for decades been in the forefront of researching catastrophic events in Earth history. I have been following his work since the early 1980s and hold him in high regard as a scientist who is willing to think outside established paradigms of Earth history. The abstract to the paper begins:

"We find that Large Igneous Province (LIP) volcanism, mostly continental flood basalts (CFBs), along with the largest extraterrestrial impacts show significant correlations with mass-extinction events in the Phanerozoic geologic record. The ages of the 6 major marine mass extinctions (≥ 40% extinction of genera) of the last 541 MY ̶ the end-Ordovician (~444 Ma), late Devonian (~ 372 Ma), end-Guadalupian (~259 Ma), end-Permian (~ 252 Ma), end-Triassic (~201 Ma), and end-Cretaceous (66 Ma) extinctions are significantly correlated with high-quality U — Pb zircon and 40Ar/39Ar ages of 6 continental flood basalts (CFBs) ̶ the Cape St. Mary's, Viluy, Emeishan, Siberian, CAMP, and the Deccan Basalts.

U — Pb zircon dating (Uranium-lead) is a widely used method for dating metamorphic rocks typically employing a thermal ionization mass spectrometer. Zircon is used because it includes uranium and thorium atoms in its crystalline structure when forming but rejects lead, so any lead found in a zircon crystal is radiogenic, meaning it results from radioactive decay. Argon dating can measure Argon isotopes from a single mineral grain. The ratio of Argon 40 to Argon 39 yields the age of the sample.

The extinctions listed above are considered to be major events in the history of life on Earth. A number of less severe extinctions have taken place, although these events are somewhat more difficult to discern in the geologic/palaeontologic record. Nevertheless, a correlation can be discerned between these extinctions and both volcanic eruptions and cosmic impact.

Geologists at Utrecht University are working hard to unravel the secrets of plate tectonics, the mechanism that continuously shapes Earth's crust and is causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This time, another mystery has been dissected. In the Earth's geological past, there were 'short' periods of a few million years during which many tectonic plates around the world suddenly changed their speed and direction. What caused these abrupt changes in plate movements? Earlier research showed that changes in movement between two plates can result from continental collisions or rising mantle plumes. But could such collisions or mantle plumes set off a global chain reaction? Now geologists have succeeded in finding evidence that supports this. "With this discovery, we are able to better understand the driving forces behind plate movements, and thus processes such as mountain formation or volcanism."

This paper, published in Nature Geoscience, was a collaboration between geoscientists from Utrecht University, Australian National University, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. To test their hypothesis, the researchers asked themselves the following question: did the formation of a new subduction zone north of Arabia that was triggered by a mantle plume that caused a super volcano near Madagascar ~100 million years ago set off a chain reaction? Utrecht professor of plate tectonics and paleogeography Douwe van Hinsbergen, geologist, former Utrecht PhD student and first author Derya Gürer, and geophysicist Roi Granot, analysed the consequences step by step. "If our hypothesis is correct, the new subduction zone that formed north of Arabia should have caused forces that accelerated, and rotated the African Plate in the 10 million years after subduction initiation. However, to analyse this, we had to solve a major problem," says Gürer.

Everyone loves a good story, especially if it's based on something true.

Consider the Greek legend of the Titanomachy, in which the Olympian gods, led by Zeus, vanquish the previous generation of immortals, the Titans. As recounted by the Greek poet Hesiod, this conflict makes for a thrilling tale - and it may preserve kernels of truth.

The eruption around 1650 B.C. of the Thera volcano could have inspired Hesiod's narrative. More powerful than Krakatoa, this ancient cataclysm in the southern Aegean Sea would have been witnessed by anyone living within hundreds of miles of the blast.

Historian of science Mott Greene argues that key moments from the Titanomachy map on to the eruption's "signature." For example, Hesiod notes that loud rumbles emanated from the ground as the armies clashed; seismologists now know that harmonic tremors - small earthquakes that sometimes precede eruptions - often produce similar sounds. And the impression of the sky - "wide Heaven" - shaking during the battle could have been inspired by shock waves in the air caused by the volcanic explosion. Hence, the Titanomachy may represent the creative misreading of a natural event.

In 2021 I published the first textbook in the field, Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events. As the book demonstrates, researchers in both the sciences and the humanities practice geomythology. In fact, geomythology's hybrid nature may help to bridge the gap between the two cultures. And despite its orientation toward the past, geomythology might also provide powerful resources for meeting environmental challenges in the future.

Researchers from National Institute of Polar Research and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics published maps indicating how the auroral zone has moved over the last three millennia.
"The Poetic Edda", an Old Norse collection of poems believed to have been most likely drawn up between 1000 and 1100 AD, contains the gods and giants of ancient Scandinavian lore but lacks perhaps the most magical of real phenomena — auroras. A century later, another Old Norse text, called "The King's Mirror", describes auroras over modern-day Greenland. Around the same time, auroras were witnessed across Japan, including written records of red and white curtain-like lights just north of Kyoto.

Why the discrepancy? Researchers set out to better understand the auroral zone and its movement over the last 3,000 years in an effort to predict how it might change in the future. The team published maps indicating how the auroral zone has moved over the last three millennia on Aug. 20 in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate.

"The accurate knowledge of the auroral zone over the past 3,000 years — via worldwide old witness record of auroras, including those even from low-latitude Japan — helps us understand the extreme magnetic storms," said first author Ryuho Kataoka, associate professor at the National Institute of Polar Research.

Sun halos and sun pillars are created from ice crystals in the sky refracting sun light, but the both look different and can form at different times of the day.
Sun halos are created when sunlight or moonlight is reflecting off ice crystals in the sky. These crystals will then form a halo around the sun. Most of the ice crystals are found in cirrus clouds or cirrostratus clouds. It usually forms a white circle or even sometimes you will see rainbow colors in the halo.