As a youngster growing up in New York, Graham Baird always was interested in science and the natural world, and in college he was fascinated with how igneous and metamorphic rocks formed. As an ...

Magma becomes lava when it rises up to the Earth’s surface, like when the Nyiragongo volcano erupted in the Democratic Republic Congo in 2020. Igneous rocks are formed when magma and lava solidify.

Sedimentary rocks are made up of pieces of older rocks (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary) and organic remains (shells, bone, etc.). When rocks break apart from erosion they are transported by ...

In the crash-car derby between heavy and light isotopes vying for the coolest spots as magma turns to solid rock, weightier isotopes have an edge, research led by Case Western Reserve University shows ...

A rock on Mars being studied by NASA's Curiosity rover is unlike any Martian stone ever seen, and is surprisingly similar to an unusual, but well-known, kind of rock on Earth. This type of rock is the ...

In my last column, I wrote about the locations where you can find igneous rocks that were formed from lava. The metarhyolite and metabasalt described in the column are known as extrusive rocks, those ...

While many rocks don’t burn, some of them do. It depends on what the rocks are made of – and that’s related to how they were formed. Rocks that burn when they get heated up are combusting. This means ...

We often talk about climate change, melting glaciers, or strange landforms. But we rarely think about something that’s always around us– rocks. They don’t make the news, but they’re everywhere. We ...

A rock on Mars being studied by NASA's Curiosity rover is unlike any Martian stone ever seen, and is surprisingly similar to an unusual, but well-known, kind of rock on Earth. This type of rock is the ...