It’s easy to mistake the earth beneath our feet as being still and unchanging — but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
In this week’s science news we’ve seen Earth’s crust peeling away under the Sierra Nevada mountains, mimicking the process that creates new continents. Looking east, an oceanic plate from the time of Pangaea is tearing apart under Iraq and Iran, dragging down the crust above and — very slowly — reshaping the Eurasian landscape.
Meanwhile in the Cascades, scientists have discovered giant magma reservoirs hidden beneath what were thought to be dormant volcanoes.
Of course, sometimes this secret, buried world makes itself known — for example the rare earthquake swarm that continued to rattle the Greek island of Santorini this week.
Hidden ‘plumbing’ under Antarctica
Deep beneath Antarctica’s ice is a hidden network of water channels that dictate how quickly the continent’s ice sheets slide and melt. This is because liquid water can lubricate ice sheets, like glass sliding across a wet countertop.
By combining existing computer models for glacier drainage and ice sheet flow, scientists predicted where water should flow beneath the ice, and where this flow is particularly strong. Their models also accurately predicted the locations of known subglacial lakes in western Antarctica.
The researchers say their findings may help pinpoint areas of Antarctica at risk of rapid melting and enable scientists to better understand how subglacial water affects ice flow.
Life’s Little Mysteries
Are birds reptiles?
You might have heard that birds are living dinosaurs. But dinosaurs are famously reptilian — so does this mean that birds are reptiles too?
Birds are warm-blooded and mostly covered in feathers, so do not fit into the classic definition of a reptile. But their DNA tells a different story…
‘Impossible’ black holes
‘Impossible’ black holes detected by James Webb telescope may finally have an explanation — if this ultra-rare form of matter exists
Supermassive black holes in the early universe, observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, have left astronomers stumped for years. The objects were growing too big and too quickly to fit into our existing models. But now, scientists have proposed a novel solution to this cosmological conundrum — clumps of dark matter.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance that, though invisible, sculpts the cosmos. Historically, this enigmatic ingredient has been thought to only interact with other matter through gravity. But now scientists have suggested that dark matter may also be able to interact with itself, clumping together into dense cores that eventually collapse into supermassive black holes.
Science Spotlight
1.4 million-year-old jaw that was ‘a bit weird for Homo’ turns out to be from never-before-seen human relative
In 1949, archaeologists discovered a 1.4 million-year-old jaw bone in a cave in South Africa. The jaw was found among other fossils belonging to the genus Homo, to which our own species belongs. But the jaw was unusually thick, with long, rectangular molars that didn’t look like those from any other Homo species.
Now, following X-ray analysis, scientists have concluded that the specimen did not belong to the Homo genus at all — rather it is a totally new extinct human relative, belonging to the genus Paranthropus.
