A new study suggests that plate tectonics—a scientific theory that divides the earth into large chunks of crust that move slowly over hot viscous mantle rock—could have been active from the planet’s very beginning.
Hidden in the Tuckaleechee Caverns in Townsend, Tennessee, is a sophisticated laboratory with a particular mission: to listen and record explosions produced by nuclear testing around the world.
A new study could help explain the driving force behind the largest mass extinction in the history of Earth, known as the End-Permian Extinction.
Colin Sumrall confirms the discovery of a 475-million-year-old fossil.
One of the Mars targets being explored by NASA’s rover Curiosity has been named St Kilda because of a very personal connection to Linda Kah, a UT scientist who is working on the mission, according to the BBC.
Times Daily interviews Hap McSween about verifying a meteorite.
UT paleontologist Stephanie Drumheller-Horton is quoted in a New York Times article about Aldabra Atoll, an island in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar that is a predator-free paradise for more than 100,000 giant tortoises.
A research team, which included UT assistant professor Nick Dygert, took to the lab to recreate the magmatic melt that once formed the lunar surface and uncovered new insights on how the modern moonscape came to be.
WVLT-TV Local 8 Now reported that UT students can now roam the planet Mars with new glasses. Using new Hololens designed by Microsoft, students can actually virtually walk on the planet, while studying the sandy, rocky terrain. Linda Kah, a UT carbonate sedimentology and geochemistry professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said
Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was part of a team that identified a new species of delta crocodile. These giant prehistoric crocodiles roamed the coasts and waterways of what’s now north-central Texas about 95 million years ago. Scientists say the Deltasuchus motherali, named after a dig
Science News reports that like sea stars, ancient echinoderms used to eat, breathe and scuttle around the seafloor with tiny tube feet. Scientists suspected that the ancient marine invertebrates, called edrioasteroids, had tube feet. A set of unusually well-preserved fossils from around 430 million year ago–described September 13 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B–provides
Through that Apollo 17 mission 45 years ago, geoscientist Lawrence “Larry” Taylor—who would go on to establish UT’s Earth and Planetary Sciences program—formed a longtime friendship and collaboration with astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt that would come to shape the collaboration between the university and NASA.
