The percentage of silica, the same mineral found in sand and glass, can give different properties to the magma. There are quite a few different types of magma under the Earth’s surface, which ...

These differences are important for two reasons. First, these different mineral mixes give off a variety of magnetic and electrical fields — which geologists can measure. That’s exactly what the USGS ...

Geologists have long debated whether a stony formation in Canada contains the world’s oldest rocks – new measurements make a ...

On a clear night, the moon you gaze upon looks the same as it looked for the first humans that walked Earth—the same ...

Magma chambers are so hard to represent because they’re ... These chambers have different temperatures in different spots, and different minerals melting at different heats or moving around in ...

Vadawale says that in geological terms, we’d expect the moon’s surface to be composed largely of minerals called anorthosites: “A key prediction of the lunar magma ocean hypothesis is the ...

As the magma ocean began to cool, minerals with different densities are thought to have crystallized out of the molten material, with denser minerals like olivine and pyroxene sinking to form the ...