The ancient North American city of Cahokia had as its focal point a feature now known as Monks Mound, a giant earthwork surrounded on its north, south, east and west by large rectangular open areas. These flat zones, called plazas by archaeologists since the early 1960s, were thought to serve as communal areas that served…
Read More “North ‘plaza’ in Cahokia was likely inundated year-round, study finds” »
A new study from The University of Western Australia has challenged earlier claims that Aboriginal stone artifacts discovered off the Pilbara coast in Western Australia represent Australia’s first undisturbed underwater archaeological site. Archaeologists working in the shallow waters off Western Australia[Credit: Jerem Leach, DHSC Project] The original findings were made in a study published in…
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Extreme dry conditions contributed to the decline of the ancient South Arabian kingdom of Himyar. Researchers from the University of Basel have reported these findings in the journal Stalagmite from the Hoti Cave. Holes are created by sampling for radioactive dating, and scratch marks by sampling for isotope analysis [Credit: Timon Kipfer, University of Basel] On…
Read More “Droughts in the sixth century paved the way for Islam” »
While wildfires over recent years have raged across much of the western United States and pose significant hazards to wildlife and local populations, wildfires have been a long-standing part of Earth’s systems without the influence of humans for hundreds of millions of years. Reflected light microscope image of a 430-million-year-old charred Prototaxites from a borehole drilled…
The Earth is a dynamic planet that has undergone major changes over the many millions of years of its history. In order to recognize and understand these changes and to derive forecasts for the planet’s future, archives are needed that have stored historical information. The Temagami BIF, a rock formation in Ontario, Canada, is such…
A group of researchers from CONICET and the University of Utah demonstrated that during the time of the first dinosaurs, variations in the diversity and abundance of the plant and vertebrate animal species cannot be related to the climatic changes recorded throughout its deposition, in contrast with previous hypotheses. Artist’s reconstruction of the Triassic ecosystem…
Read More “Previous hypotheses questioned in origin of dinosaurs in Argentina” »
An international team of scientists from UCL (University College London), the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Natural History Museum (London) and the University of Florence have found a remarkable type of fossilisation that has remained almost entirely overlooked until now. The images show the impressions of a collapsed cell-wall covering (a coccosphere) on the surface…
Read More “Discovery of ‘ghost’ fossils reveals plankton resilience to past global warming events” »
A study carried out in the area around the Pego-Oliva Marshland Natural Park, between Valencia and Alicante, reveals how the rise in sea level impacted the human groups that inhabited this area of the Mediterranean coast during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The protected natural area of the Pego-Oliva marshlands [Credit: Asociacion RUVID] The research…
New research led by the University of Cambridge is the first to take a detailed image of an unusual pocket of rock at the boundary layer with Earth’s core, some three thousand kilometres beneath the surface. Etna volcano eruption, 12 January 2011 [Credit: gnuckx] The enigmatic area of rock, which is located almost directly beneath…
Read More “Puzzling features deep in Earth’s interior illuminated” »
Organisms adjust their cell walls according to environmental conditions such as temperature. Some adaptations involve changes in lipids which may still be preserved long after the rest of the organisms has been degraded. Researchers at the University of Gottingen studied a specific group of lipids called long chain diols which are found in sea sediments…
Read More “Algae reveal clues about climate changes over millions of years” »
