Geology

The famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum created a super-heated ash cloud that turned one unlucky man's brain to glass, a new study suggests.

Projectiles flying faster than bullets from a blast 130 times bigger than the global nuclear stockpile helped form giant lunar canyons, according to a new study.

More than 200 tremors have been registered since Friday between the Greek volcanic islands of Santorini and Amorgos.

The expansion of the Roman empire to Greece 2,100 years ago coincided with a rise in lead pollution as a by-product of an increased demand for metals, according to some of the earliest traces of of lead still detectable in the ocean today.

Geoscience Australia says Darwin and the Latrobe Valley are more likely to experience "strong ground shaking". The latter is among the sites the Coalition has identified as a potential home for a nuclear reactor. 

Researchers say the 166-million-year-old fossilised footprints could be one of the world's biggest dinosaur track sites.

Iceland's famous Blue Lagoon has been temporarily closed as lava continues to spill from a volcanic fissure on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

The origin of the strange clearing, which is still visible today, was detected by a scientist trawling through satellite data.

In a fossil-rich pocket of northern New South Wales, two pioneering palaeontologists have spent decades digging up rare relics of the past, striking deals with collectors and opal miners and unlocking our understanding of deep geological history.

Social media reports of fireballs lighting up the night sky seemingly pop up very regularly — just this week hundreds of people saw one over the US and Canada. Are they becoming more frequent or are we just better at catching them?

Weather conditions and shifting sands temporarily reveal an ancient "elder" forest on a Tasmanian beach, preserved from thousands of years ago.

Western science has long debated when the towering pillars of the Pinnacles came to be. A new study suggests most of the spires formed when a particularly wet period dissolved the surrounding rock.

Rising a couple of millimetres per year on average, Mt Everest is having a growth spurt. A new study suggests that a "pirated" river thousands of years ago might have given it a boost.

Researchers and local Indigenous people say a beautifully preserved metre-wide and 40-centimetres-high tree stump may be a thousand-year-old messenger with a story to share about climate change.

A strange signal that shook the planet in September last year has been traced back to a tsunami from a melting glacier in the Arctic. And it may happen again.

Inside the Three Sisters cave is a "spectacular sight" but access and safety concerns have kept divers away. Recent upgrades to the site are expected to change that.

An earth-shaking experiment links the same principles found in your barbecue lighter to the creation of gold nuggets.

Geoscience Australia says there could be more earthquakes in the WA Wheatbelt "for days and weeks to come" after multiple tremors over the past week.

With a small, waterproof notebook, Ciara Smart and her team have painstakingly sketched out every feature of a 401-metre-deep cave system in Tasmania.

The warning is the first issued under new rules drawn up after a 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster killed around 18,500 people in Japan.