Outcrops in the Thurston Island area of West Antarctica consist primarily of plutonic rocks that range in composition from gabbro to granite and yield isotopic dates from 347 to 97 Ma. They intrude ...

Kris Wang is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where he is studying geosciences with a focus on volcanology and igneous petrology.

Scientists on NASA's Perseverance mission made a surprising discovery about the composition of rock in Jezero Crater, one that will help them get a better idea of when water existed on Mars, and ...

Pumice is an example of extrusive igneous rock. The word extrusive means that the magma was forced onto the earth's surface and cooled in a matter of hours. Granite is an example of intrusive igneous ...

T o the untrained eye, the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC), in northeastern South Africa, is kind of unassuming. It’s roughly the same size as West Virginia – or, for metric users, the Republic of ...

THE closing years of the nineteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in the petrology of gneous rocks, which must be regarded as marking an important stage in the development of that subject.

The rover collected exciting rock samples on the first leg of its epic journey. Next, it will turn towards an ancient river delta to look for past life. Instead, Perseverance has spent the year ...

One main goal of NASA's Mars 2020 mission is to determine when conditions on the planet were conducive to the formation of liquid water. Hence the target Jezero crater, seemingly a lakebed with a ...

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 ...

An astonishing new rock formation has been revealed in the Colorado Rockies, and it exists in a deeply perplexing relationship with older rocks. Named the Tava sandstone, this sedimentary rock forms ...