Geology

Updated 8:20 p.m. We've been getting reports of aftershocks from Tuesday afternoon's earthquake that affected much of the east coast. The U.S.G.S. says the latest aftershock happened a little after 8:00 and had a 4.2 magnitude. Aftershocks are often...

By John Kemp LONDON, May 7 (Reuters) - No one has ever seen an oil field. Typically buried thousands of feet below the surface, oil fields are like a sponge saturated with a mixture of oil, water and gas, rather than the underground cavern most people...

By John Kemp LONDON, May 1 (Reuters) - The Williston Basin underneath North Dakota, Montana and South Dakota contains twice as much crude and three times more gas than previously thought, according to an updated assessment published by the U.S....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A global long-term cooling trend ended late in the 19th century and was followed decades later by the warmest temperatures in nearly 1,400 years, a sweeping study of temperature change showed. The study, by a consortium of 78...

When Debra Buczkowski was 7, in 1976, NASA’s Viking space probes were landing on Mars and sending images of the red planet back to Earth as part of their $1 billion mission. “I realized that no matter where I went on this planet, I couldn&...

HOUSTON -- Oklahoma’s largest-recorded earthquake was triggered by injection wells used by the oil and gas industry, according to a report released this week. The Tuesday report in the geoscience journal Geology is the latest scientific evidence...

The question of how an oil spill from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline might affect the Ogallala aquifer was raised again this month, in a report the U.S. State Department will use to help it decide whether to approve or reject the controversial project....

Sometimes, it's comforting to know that none of us are really in charge. There but for the grace of the great roulette wheel in the sky go I. I refer to the planetary stray bullets called asteroids, one of which streaked into the Russian atmosphere...

The last statewide map of Maryland geology, published in 1968, is out of print. Online versions of it are marked with a disclaimer that it's too imprecise for anything but "historical and illustrative purposes." But a push to drill for Marcellus shale...

HASTINGS, Minn. - Debbie Carlson can laugh at the irony: She's the wife of a well digger who can't find good water for his own family. Like one out of three wells in Dakota County, hers is so contaminated with nitrates she won't let anyone drink from it...

As sure as an automobile could not have been built by even the most enterprising Neanderthal, the appearance of humans on Earth could not have occurred without the myriad of developments that began with the birth of the universe, and continued with the...

I recently had the privilege of hanging out backstage with Bill McKibben on 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour. Any regular reader of this column has heard me talk about McKibben before. He’s the author and environmentalist who began his...