The Conversation: Witness 1.8 billion years of tectonic plates dance across Earth’s surface in a new animation

Two tectonic plates meet in Thingvellir National Park, Iceland. VisualProduction/Shutterstock Alan Collins, Univ of Adelaide Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, we have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s geological record has been used like this, looking so far back … Read more…

Space News: Surprising connections between Earth and Mars

Space Connect reported how EarthByters discovered that Earth’s interactions with Mars can drive deep sea circulation here on Earth. The podcast covers how geological records of the deep sea were used to discover a link between the orbits of the two planets and past global warming patterns, talking through the research and their collaboration with Sorbonne … Read more…

Quirks and Quarks: EarthByte on Canadian National Radio with a story on Earth, Mars and ocean mixing

Mars has more influence on Earth than non-astrologers might have thought. Mars is, on average, about 225 million kilometres from Earth, which would suggest that it has little impact on our planet. Which is true, but as they say, a little goes a long way. In our recent paper in Nature Communications, we studied the history of deep … Read more…

Nature Communications: Deep-sea hiatus record reveals orbital pacing by 2.4 Myr eccentricity grand cycles

Astronomical forcing of Earth’s climate is embedded in the rhythms of stratigraphic records, most famously as short-period (10^4–10^5 year) Milankovitch cycles. Astronomical grand cycles with periods of millions of years also modulate climate variability but have been detected in relatively few proxy records. Here, we apply spectral analysis to a dataset of Cenozoic deep-sea hiatuses … Read more…

AuScope News: EarthByters unveil Ice Age secrets

Notebook resting on an Ice Age or the transition from the Tonian Skillogallee and Myrtle Springs Formations to the overlying Cryogenian Sturt Formation (Sturt Glaciation, marked by the notebook) in the Willouran Ranges, Adnyamathanha Country, South Australia. Image: Alan Collins ARC Future Fellow Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz from the EarthByte Group and colleagues have used NCRIS … Read more…

A new explanation for the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth episodes

Reposted from Earth Logs by Steve Drury The Cryogenian Period that lasted from 860 to 635 million years ago is aptly named, for it encompassed two maybe three episodes of glaciation. Each left a mark on every modern continent and extended from the poles to the Equator. In some way, this series of long, frigid … Read more…