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TOKYO (AP) — A volcano in southern Japan erupted Wednesday with a massive column of gray smoke billowing into the sky. The Japan Meteorological Agency raised the warning level for Mount Aso to three on a scale of five, warning hikers and residents to avoid the mountain....

Full title: Ancient bubbles in Australian rocks show early Earth's air weighed less than half today's atmosphere Air bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old Australian rock suggest the Earth's atmosphere weighed less than half of today and was much thinner than previously thought. Researchers analysed the size of air bubbles that formed at the top and bottom of lava flows along the Beasley River in Western Australia's Pilbara region almost three billion years ago and used the data to calculate the atmospheric pressure at the time. The results suggest that the air at the time exerted at most half the pressure...

Canadian geologists say they can shed light on how a vast lake, trapped under the ice sheet that once smothered much of North America, drained into the sea, an event that cooled Earth's climate for hundreds of years. During the last ice age, the Laurentide Ice Sheet once covered most of Canada and parts of the northern United States with a frozen crust that in some places was three kilometres (two miles) thick. As the temperature gradually rose some 10,000 years ago, the ice receded, gouging out the hollows that would be called the Great Lakes. Beneath the ice's thinning...

What may be a new outermost layer of the Earth's core has been found, geoscientists have revealed. This discovery could help solve mysteries of the planet's magnetic field, researchers say. The Earth's core is composed mainly of iron, divided into a solid inner center roughly 1,500 miles (2,440 kilometers) wide covered by a liquid outer layer about 1,400 miles (2,250 km) thick. Even though the bulk of the core is iron, researchers also knew it contained a small amount of lighter elements such as oxygen and sulfur. As the inner core crystallized over time, scientists think this process forced out...

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...

, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings. The geothermal drill in Switzerland was shut down after it caused 100...

Seismic shockers are to be expected, but planet seems to be more active. SNIP While the Chilean earthquake wasn't directly related to Japan's 7.0-magnitude temblor, the two have some factors in common. For one, any seismic waves that made their way from Japan to the Chilean coast could play a slight role in ground-shaking. "It is too far away for any direct triggering, and those distances also make the seismic waves as they would pass by from the Haiti or Japan events pretty small because of attenuation," Arrowsmith told LiveScience. (Attenuation is the decrease in energy with distance.) "Nevertheless, if...

Geoscience rediscovers Phoenicia's buried harbors Space and Earth science : January 05, 2006 The exact locations of Tyre and Sidon's ancient harbors, Phoenicia's two most important city-states, have attracted scholarly interest and debate for many centuries. New research reveals that the ancient basins lie buried beneath the medieval and modern city centers. A network of sediment cores have been sunk into the cities' coastal deposits and studied using high-resolution geoscience techniques to elucidate how, where, and when Tyre and Sidon's harbors evolved since their Bronze Age foundations. In effect, ancient port basins are rich geological archives replete with information on...

AN asteroid the size of a house that exploded with the power of an atom bomb over Antarctica last year may help scientists prepare for the entrance of larger bodies into the Earth's atmosphere. The 1000-tonne asteroid crashed to Earth in millions of pieces last September, 900km from the nearest humans at Japan's Syowa station. A trail of dust recorded by a physicist 1500km away at Australia's Davis station shows that if the asteroid had not fragmented into tiny pieces when it hit the Earth's atmosphere, it would have had an impact similar to the bombing of Hiroshima. Dr Andrew...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Scientists are eagerly awaiting the return of a "slow earthquake" that could give them clues to when and where the next major quake will strike Pacific Coast of North America. The recently discovered phenomenon is believed to occur about every 14 months, which would put the next event anytime now, but people are unlikely to feel anything because it will occur 12 to 25 miles below the earth's surface. "We're all rushing in every morning and every night looking at the records to see if it has started," Garry Rogers, a seismologist with the Pacific...