Congratulations to A/Prof Maria Seton, who has been awarded the S.W. Carey Medal from the Geological Society of Australia for her outstanding contribution and impact in the field of tectonics. The award was announced at the Australian Earth Sciences Convention in Melbourne, as part of the Geological Society of Australia’s 2026 national awards. A/Prof Seton … Read more…
Our planet has experienced dramatic climate shifts throughout its history, oscillating between freezing “icehouse” periods and warm “greenhouse” states. Scientists have long linked these climate changes to fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, new research reveals the source of this carbon – and the driving forces behind it – are far more complex than previously … Read more…
The power of volcanoes to change Earth’s climate may not be as ancient as previously thought. Throughout our planet’s history, the climate has fluctuated between “icehouse” and “greenhouse” conditions, largely determined by the levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. Volcanic arcs, the giant chains of erupting peaks in places like … Read more…
Landscapes evolve through the coupled effects of tectonics and surface processes. Previous studies have shown that uplift rate changes generate upstream-migrating erosion waves, altering downstream slopes while upstream slopes remain constant until the wave arrives. However, the distinctive differences between landscape responses to uplift versus climatic changes, particularly rainfall rate changes, remain incompletely described. This … Read more…
Sydney University Media Release, 20 October 2025 Plate tectonics played central role shaping life-supporting oceans Between 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago, Earth’s tectonic activity locked atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbonate minerals within the oceanic crust, paving the way for oxygen-rich seas and evolving life. Source: research paper A study led by researchers from the … Read more…
For the past 250 million years, species have diversified and died out while Earth’s tectonic plate movements and sea level changes have operated in the background. They’re linked, according to new research that found that processes altering the lithosphere affect ocean levels and, in turn, the availability of shallow marine environments in which life thrives. “Why we … Read more…
Our capability to reconstruct past landscapes and the processes that shape them underpins our understanding of paleo-Earth. We take advantage of a global-scale landscape evolution model assimilating paleoelevation and paleoclimate reconstructions over the past 100 million years. This model provides continuous quantifications of metrics critical to the understanding of the Earth system, from global physiography … Read more…
The Cenozoic landscape evolution in southwestern North America is ascribed to crustal isostasy, dynamic topography, or lithosphere tectonics, but their relative contributions remain controversial. Here we reconstruct landscape history since the late Eocene by investigating the interplay between mantle convection, lithosphere dynamics, climate, and surface pro- cesses using fully coupled four-dimensional numerical models. Our quantified … Read more…
The rise of a mountain range affects moisture circulation in the atmosphere and water runoff across the land surface, modifying the distribution of precipitation and drainage patterns in its vicinity. Water routing in turn affects erosion on hillslopes and incision in river channels on surrounding mountain ranges. In central Guatemala, two parallel, closely spaced mountain … Read more…
The existence of mantle plumes was first proposed in the 1970s to explain intra-plate, hotspot volcanism, yet owing to difficulties in resolving mantle upwellings with geophysical images and discrepancies in interpretations of geochemical and geochronological data, the origin, dynamics and composition of plumes and their links to plate tectonics are still contested. In a recently … Read more…