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16 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 15, 2026.
Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray tomography of ash and lapilli from Etna, Stromboli and La Palma's Cumbre Vieja found sutures, welded clasts and re-broken crystals that record repeated fragmentation. The size of what comes out, which sets how far ash travels and how long airports close, depends on the healing as much as the breaking.
A 1.4-mile core through the roots of an ancient mountain range holds a chemical logbook of life switching on and off underground.
Manchester researchers watched magma from La Palma's 2021 eruption crystallize inside an X-ray-transparent pressure vessel, and found extra heat dissolves the seeds new crystals need.
Glass dredged from the Kermadec arc north of New Zealand carries several times more gold than mid-ocean ridge magma. The trick is that the mantle has to melt more than once.
ETH Zurich simulations suggest the planet's vast canyons are far younger than assumed — evidence that Venus is tectonically alive rather than a dead world frozen in place.
By reading nickel isotopes trapped in the impact debris, researchers pinned the Chicxulub catastrophe on a primitive class of meteorite that rarely reaches Earth.
A new study suggests Europe's most active volcano is fed by static pockets of magma some 80 kilometers down, defying the three classic ways volcanoes are thought to form.
An underwater eruption near Papua New Guinea has been spewing steam and staining the ocean since May, and scientists are waiting to see whether a new island will be born.
Tokyo researchers show lightweight detector could identify key elements across entire lunar surface in two-year mission.
Buried under ice up to three kilometers thick, the newly mapped structure radiates from a single point near the South Pole and may shape how the ice sheet responds to warming.
Newly mapped Lytle Beach and Vasa Park faults last cracked open around 1833, putting four million people in the Puget Sound region at greater near-term shaking risk than the much larger Cascadia subduction megathrust offshore.
New research suggests the Cascadia subduction zone and San Andreas fault can trigger earthquakes within hours of each other, potentially hitting multiple cities simultaneously.
Researchers finally cracked the mystery of why the widespread mineral couldn't be grown in laboratories by discovering nature's built-in reset mechanism.
Breakthrough discovery reveals why the common geological mineral has resisted laboratory growth, potentially reshaping materials science approaches.
Breakthrough reveals how tiny defects block mineral formation in labs but get washed away in nature over millions of years.
Researchers successfully grew the mineral in laboratory conditions by understanding atomic-level defects. The discovery could revolutionize how high-tech materials are manufactured.