The West Mata undersea volcano, located 200 kilometers from Samoa, erupted in May. Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent the remotely operated underwater vehicle Jason to record the explosive action. In addition to tossing up lava and chunks of rock, West Mata also released a significant amount of sulfuric acid into the water, rendering its acidity somewhere between battery acid and stomach acid. The research team collected various samples and is analyzing them and the footage to better understand these deep sea eruptions and the life that exists around these deep underwater volcanoes. Meanwhile, we get a spectacular view of the eruption itself.

Cameras catch underwater volcano in the act [Science News]

The authorities have already evacuated everyone living within an eight-kilometer radius, as small earthquakes, glowing lava at the peak, and falling ash created fears that the volcano was going to erupt once again. According to NASA:

On the evening of December 14, the local volcano observatory raised the alert level to Level 3, which means "magma is close to the crater and hazardous explosive eruption is imminent."

This natural-color image of Mayon was captured on December 15, 2009, by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. A small plume of ash and/or steam is blowing west from the summit. Dark-colored lava or debris flows from previous eruptions streak the flanks of the mountain. A ravine on the southeast slope is occupied by a particularly prominent lava or debris flow.

According to local news reports from December 16, fragments of lava were continuously detaching from the lava filing the crater and cascading down slope up to 3 kilometers. Lava flows reached several hundred meters from the summit, but they were still confined to ravines.

[NASA Earth Observatory]

At a recent meeting of the Geological Society of America, researchers announced that the colorful deposits, found in lava caves all over the world, are in fact biological in origin. Previously undetected microbes excrete waste inside the caves and the buildup of what one geomicrobiologist terms "bug poop" creates these impressive displays.

This discovery — that something long thought to be mineral turned out to be biological — has implications for researchers looking for life on Mars. Based on photos of the surface, it appears that Mars holds, or at one time held, lava caves similar to those where the microbe waste was found, and similar microbes might have thrived inside those caves. Mars researchers may want to consider taking samples of apparent mineral deposits to determine if those deposits are, in fact, "bug poop."

Lava Cave Minerals Actually Microbe Poop [National Geographic via Neatorama]

Researchers reported this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they found have found shock-synthesized diamonds — known to result from impact events — in the Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island in California, and have previously found similar diamonds in the Greenland Ice Sheet. The placement of the Arlington Canyon diamonds coincide with North America's oldest known human remains — from the Clovis people, who went extinct nearly 13,000 years ago — and the disappearance of the pygmy mammoth from Santa Rosa. This fits with the team's earlier speculation that a comet strike led to a mass mammalian extinction across North America:

In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a "black mat" of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an airburst.

However, the hypothesis remains controversial, and other geologists and archeologists are reluctant to buy the diamonds as evidence of a comet-induced die-off, especially given the absence of an impact crater.

Did a Comet Cause a North American Die-Off around 13,000 Years Ago? [Scientific American]

In this image, you can see the volcanic plume extending into the sky. But you can also see the atmospheric shock wave from the eruption, which pushed the clouds back into a ring in the sky. Also visible is a smooth, fluffy white cloud on top of the rapidly rising ash column. This is likely a result of rapidly rising water vapor condensing on top of the plume.

A detail of the image also reveals what is known as the pyroclastic flow. This is a mixture of super hot gas and ash that can travel at up to 130 miles per hour. It's similar to the kind of rapidly moving pyroclastic surge that supposedly wiped out Pompeii so quickly, killing everyone in its path. It's a beautiful image, dense with interesting quirks that demonstrate just how powerful, dangerous and complex volcanoes are.

via NASA Earth Observatory

The U.S. geological survey was on the scene earlier this year when watered-swollen rivers pouring into the Suwannee flooded rural parts of the state. They took measurements in flooded state parks, and from the tops of bridges that were being lapped by the floodwaters.

According to a release from the USGS:

The Withlacoochee River at Pinetta reached a new record height on midnight of April 7. USGS measured the peak height at 41.34 feet, the highest the river had been measured in 77 years of records. The previous record for the river's height was set in the 1948 flood, when the river reached a height of 38.64 feet.

"The discharge measurement at the Withlacoochee River near Pinetta was a major priority for the National Weather Service, because they needed data to forecast the downstream flooding on the Suwannee River at Ellaville," said USGS hydrologist Richard Verdi.

The magnitude of the flow in the Withlacoochee for April 7 indicates an approximate 2% chance of occurrence any year. Preliminary data indicate the peak discharge was 56,100 cubic feet per second, which indicates that the volume of water flowing through the river was at the second highest in the period of record. In the 1948 flood, the discharge was higher, at 79,400 cubic feet per second.

You can watch Florida's flood season progress in real time via this map.

Images via Rachel Pawlitz, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

Hailing from the Middle Eocene (about 47 million years ago), this discovery will help to shed light on the early history of a potential human ancestor. Discovered in the late 1980s, the specimen was divided into two separate parts and sold to different buyers, and wasn't reassembled until 2007.

This new species, now called Darwinius masillae, is named for Charles Darwin, and is believed to exist very close to an evolutionary branch that would eventually lead to modern primates and humans. This specimen in particular is a young female, named Ida, and is so highly preserved that soft tissues and fur impressions were preserved, along with the digestive tract that allowed researchers to discover the last meal that it ingested - fruits and leaves. She also had a broken wrist, which had since healed, and it is believed that she would have been about 9 months old. Alive, she would have weighed around two pounds, and about two feet in length.

This finding is a remarkable one, not only for the high preservation of the fossil, but for the potential implications for paleontologists. A mere twenty million years prior to this is the KT boundary, a major extinction line that saw the demise of the Dinosaurs. With their passing came the rise of the mammals, and a world that looked much like ours today. The location where Ida was discovered is known as the Grube Messel, a World Heritage Site, and 47 million years ago, it was a para-tropical rain forest.

Complete specimens are also extremely useful for scientists, to learn as much as possible about the species. This particular find is missing an arm, and is somewhat crushed, but remains the most complete primate ever discovered, which will yield an enormous amount of information on how Ida and her kind moved, what they ate and what their life cycle would likely have been. Certain changes between this and earlier fossils also helps to uncover information about the evolution of this group, and Ida seems to represent a certain amount of diversification within this group of primates. Scientists believe that this species falls at an early time in the ancestral line that would eventually lead to humans.

Source: /PLoS ONE/

The image above was snapped by GeoEye-1, a commercial satellite. Located about 100 miles southwest of the city of Anchorage, the over 10-thousand-foot-tall Mt. Redoubt has been spewing steam and ash high into the atmosphere, but now NASA reports that its emissions are closer to Earth. This plume is extremely dark, which suggests the mountain is mostly erupting with ash instead of steam this week. And that's not very good news. According to NASA:

Volcanic ash consists of tiny shards of rocks and volcanic glass. Extremely abrasive and mildly corrosive, this kind of ash can even conduct electricity when wet, sometimes leading to electrical outages. Winds can easily carry volcanic ash hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from the eruption site.

So the ash we're seeing here is potentially quite dangerous. Below is another satellite image of the Redoubt eruption, taken last week.

via NASA Earth Observatory

Over at Discovery News, io9 pal Michael Reilly reports on a study about the exact ingredients required to whip up a mass extinction event like the one in the Permian-Triassic, which destroyed 90 percent of life on the planet. Researchers Nan Arens and Ian West argue that a mass extinction is caused by a combination of "pulse" events - short, sharp shocks like meteor strikes - and "press" events like millennia-long climate change from constantly-erupting volcanoes. Arens and West base their assertions on intensive study of mass extinction events in Earth's past.

Asks Reilly:

Can researchers come up with a "Grand Unified Theory" of ancient apocalypse?

West and Arens think so. They combed the last 300 million years of geologic record, noting impact craters, massive eruptions, periods of ancient climate change, and then comparing them to extinctions. The rate at which species die off spiked dramatically, they found, when a "pulse"-type event occurred within a million years or so of a "press."

The theory fits well for the dinosaurs. Around the time of their demise 65 million years ago, a comet slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula and a huge volcano, the Deccan Traps, was erupting in what is today India.

But other extinctions are problematic. The greatest dying in geologic history, the Permian-Triassic extinction, killed 90 percent of all life on Earth, but there is no record of an impact. Instead, all signs point to a 200,000-year-long volcanic eruption in Siberia as the murder weapon.

Arens and West's work also suggests that Earth may be headed for a new mass extinction, because climate change is a common form of press event, and all we really need is one big pulse event to reach the total apocalypse tipping point.

SOURCES:
Discovery News

Paleobiology

This photo was taken by Carsten Peter for National Geographic. The magazine explains:

[In the Afar Depression,] spreading mid-ocean ridges forming the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden emerge on land and meet the East African Rift.

Those circular structures around the pool are made of travertine, which is "a volcanically heated, calcium-rich flow from hot springs." Want to see a bigger version of this photo, plus several more images of what happens to the land at the edges of tectonic plates? Check out the photo essay at National Geographic.

Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Called the Hadean period in reference to the Greek term for hell (Hades), the first 700 million years of Earth's history was a time when the planet was bombarded by deadly meteorites. Now, however, most geologists have accepted the idea that single-celled organisms could have lived through these catastrophic hits. And the article just published in Nature reveals that the early planet probably had land masses and bodies of water.

By examining zircons, a type of crystal found in 4 billion-year-old Australian rocks, a team of U.S. scientists determined not only that water had been present in the area at the time, but that the rocks had existed in a chunk of cooled planetary crust caused by plate tectonics. Plus, the planet was likely a lot cooler than previously imagined, though probably hotter than it is today.

The temperature difference would have been caused partly by plate tectonics, which leeches greenhouse gasses from the air as it churns the Earth's crust. But that temperature would also have been affected by the weakness of the young sun, which put out 30 percent less energy than it does today.

These new theories about the early Earth help explain why geologists have discovered signs of life blooming all over the planet starting about 3 billion years ago. In fact, life was probably evolving for as much as a billion years before that. And except for those occasional apocalyptic meteor hits, life evolved on a planet whose climate might not have been all that different from the one we experience today.

Low Heat Flow Inferred from Zircons [via Nature]

A New View of Early Earth [via NYT]

Image via New York Times (Left, Bruce Watson; right, Don Dixon).

The textures above are colorized images taken by the MRO. According to National Geographic:

From top to bottom: Sand dunes show streaks of dust and carbon dioxide frost being blown by the wind. In Russell Crater mysterious gullies scar the face of a brown dune. It's unclear how they form, but sublimation—the instant transformation of carbon dioxide frost into gas when surface temperatures rise—could play a role. "We don't have anything on Earth that compares to this process," says NASA's Candice Hansen-Koharcheck. Across the tops of other dunes, dark tracks, looking like clumps of hair, appear where dust devils have scoured away beige sediments. And at the south pole, pits that grow wider each year pockmark a sheet of dry ice. Thermal evidence suggests a layer of water ice may lie below the slab.

This crater is less than 1 million years old, and gives scientists a look under the covers of the Martian landscape. Like the images above, this one has been given a false coloration to help researchers distinguish dust from rock. Here, the rock is bluer than the dust.

This image, of Victoria crater, is very close to the actual color of Mars. You can still see the swirling texture of the wind-carved rocks.

Visions of Mars [via National Geographic] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

According to the Geological Survey of Finland, which created the map out of years of survey research:

This map is the first global compilation of the wealth of magnetic anomaly information derived from more than 50 years of aeromagnetic surveys over land areas, research vessel magnetometer traverses at sea, and observations from earth-orbiting satellites, supplemented by anomaly values derived from oceanic crustal ages. The objective is to provide an interpretive dimension to surface observations of the Earth’s composition and geologic structure. Metamorphism, petrology, and redox state all have important effects on the magnetism of crustal materials.

The magnetic anomalies represented on this map originate primarily in igneous and metamorphic rocks, in the Earth's crust and possibly, uppermost mantle. Magnetic anomalies represent an estimate of the short-wavelenght (< 2600 km) fields associated with these parts of the Earth, after estimates of fields from other sources have been subtracted from the measured field magnitude. In most places the magnetic anomaly field is less than 1 per cent of the total magnetic field.

Magnetic Anomaly Map of the World [via Commission for Geological Maps of the World]

The answer is a bit dismal: not much. All our technology, culture, and art would be reduced to a thin smear of sediment. Our grandest edifices would amount to a few millimeters in a core sample. Analysis might reveal the pollutants we deposited so vigorously during our brief tenure. A debate might erupt in the journals of the day: did the peculiarly rapid climate change coincide with our era coincidentally, or did we cause it ourselves?

Oddly (for a geologist), Zalasiewicz seems very concerned with the opinions of the distant future, vexing over the fact that they might call us the "amazingly clever and utterly foolish two-legged ape." He's even published a book on the subject, The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave In The Rocks?

Image by: mobilestreetlife.

The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave In The Rocks? [Science Daily]

Bob Douglas took this in Hawaii, at the Pu`u`O`o vent on the Kilauea Volcano, where lava meets water. Here you can see lava being hurled into the air, and as it hits the ocean it sends up those intense, thick clouds of steam in the background. You can see more of winning photos at the National Geographic website, and download extra-large sizes for your desktop.

International Photography Contest Desktop Wallpaper [via National Geographic] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

According to the European Space Agency:

[This is] an image taken by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express of Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on the Red Planet. Echus Chasma, which resembles Arizona's Grand Canyon, is an approximately 62.1 miles (100 km) long and 6.2 miles (10 km) wide. The data was acquired on 25 September 2005. A 4000-meter-high cliff marks the edge of the source area of Kasei Valles in its western part. Gigantic water falls may have once plunged over these cliffs on to the valley floor. The original shoreline is still partially visible. The remarkably smooth valley floor was later flooded by basaltic lava.

Photos via AP.

Echus Chasma Images from Mars Express [via People's Daily Online]

The project's lead scientist, John Parkes says the the discovery is just the beginning. The deeper in the Eath you go the hotter it gets, obviously, and the critters Parkes and his team found live in sediments that sit at about 100 degrees C, or the boiling point of water. That's from from the hottest environment bacteria have ever been found in, though, so he thinks life could survive even deeper as much as 5 or 6 kilometers down.

Source: Nature

Even if Mars has had steadily sub-freezing weather for a long time now, glaciers can provide the kind of cover needed to maintain liquid water. We know from Earthling ice sheets that as you go deeper inside them, the temperature tends to go up. Down near the bottom the crushing pressure of miles of ice piled on top can cause melting. Ponds and lakes can even form.

The researchers — headed by Jay Dickson of Brown University — think the same thing could've happened on Mars:

After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars' mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years - akin to the day before yesterday in Mars' geological timeline.

This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life.

"We've gone from seeing Mars as a dead planet for three-plus billion years to one that has been alive in recent times," said Jay Dickson, a research analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown and lead author of the Geology paper. "[The finding] has changed our perspective from a planet that has been dry and dead to one that is icy and active."

Images from Mars orbiter.
Source: Geology via Science Blog

• Richard Cook, designer of MSL, said that it's three times heavier than Spirit and Opportunity, the two rovers currently on Mars right now. It's powered by nuclear energy, designed to last 20 years, travel 10 km, and comes equipped with a laser for vaporizing rocks so it can do chemical and mineralogical analysis on them. "We call it the death ray," he confessed. Joked NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Director Charles Elachi, "In a few years people will be visiting Mars and see bullet holes all over the place [from the laser]."
• When Cook and his team were designing Spirit and Opportunity, they wanted to do what he called a "built to print," meaning to the specs on paper. They wanted to base it on the model they'd developed for Sojourner, the previous generation Martian rover. But immediately they figured out that wouldn't work, especially with the more-complicated MER rovers, since they still had to fit inside a small lander. "it's hard to take a rover and put it inside a tetrahedron," Cook said with a laugh, referring to the shape of the lander.
• The MSL rover, which will blast off next year, will be able to do experiments that tell us a lot more about Martian water sources. It can do gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS). It has an onboard camera.
• Steve Squyres said he was disappointed when Spirit landed in Gusev Crater, which he hoped would be a lakebed. Instead, it was covered in a layer of lava rocks. "I believe the lakebed is there, but it's covered in lava," he said. Luckily, Spirit was able to make it to the Columbia Hills nearby to study a wide variety of rocks.
• Some of the rocks that Spirit studied show strong evidence of having been saturated by water, probably steam. Most likely, the hit that created the Gusev Crater shot a bunch of superhot rocks out to the Columbia Hills, and these melted ground water into steam.
• "When we talk about water on Mars, what we really mean is sulfuric acid," Squyres explained with a grin.
• There is absolutely no doubt that there has been water on Mars, Squyres said, but the fact is that the ratio of water to rocks has always been very low. One piece of compelling visual evidence he showed us was from a study of the sorts of patterns water leaves in soil over years of flowing on it. He compared images of a characteristic, smile-shaped pattern created by waters from the Colorado River with images from rocks on Mars. The smile shapes and sizes were nearly exactly the same.
• The rover Opportunity is currently at the Victoria Crater, where it is studying layers in the cliffs to learn more about the geological history of Mars. Some layers make it clear that water did at one point saturate the planet's surface. The walls of the crater are so steep that scientists have to pilot the rover based on satellite images taken by a recently-arrived spacecraft. He showed us images from the spacecraft, which are so high-resolution that you can see Opportunity and the shadow of its antenna at the edge of the crater.
• About the Victoria Crater mission, Squyres said, "It takes a lot of guts to drive an 8 hundred million dollar piece of equipment along the edge of a cliff on another planet."
• Andrew Knoll said that the real question isn't whether there has been water on Mars, because surely there has been. The question is whether that water is habitable for life as we know it.
• Unfortunately for people who want to meet alien life, the prognosis is not good. Chemical and mineral evidence suggests that water on the planet is so salty and acidic that it wouln't support any organisms we know. "Water on Mars would be challenging for life as we know it," he said.
• Knoll added that water could have flowed on Mars if it was extremely salty because salt lowers the freezing point of water. Or it could have flowed as a result of asteroid hits that temporarily melted ice.
• MSL will do more definitive mineral analysis to determine what the chemical composition of Martian water might have been (or might be).
• There has been a lot of debate over the Martian "gullies," structures that look like they were cut into the Martian surface with water. Squyres said, "Some were created during the last five years and look like they've been created by water. But all the ones we've looked at have slopes that suggest they were probably caused by avalanche not water."