That evocative "earthy" scent of the soil returning to life in spring — and nasty earthy tastes and odors in fish and drinking water — actually results from two substances released by soil bacteria.

In a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience, the geophysicist Mioara MANDEA from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam and her Danish colleague Nils OLSEN from the National Space Institute/DTU Copenhagen, have shown that motions in the fluid in the Earth’s core are changing surprisingly fast, and that this, in turn, effects the magnetic field of our Planet.

Even in geology, it's not often a date gets revised by 500 million years.

Single person submersibles have been called in to help scientists retrieve samples from a lake in northern British Columbia that may hold vital clues to the history of life on Earth and on other planets.

Diamonds will take center stage this month in countless wedding ceremonies and other celebrations. In addition to their usual role as symbols of enduring love and fidelity, diamonds are now also helping geologists unravel clues about how the earth's precious metal mineralization was formed and why diamonds and some of these metals are found in only a few places around the world.

A team of researchers at Harvard University have modeled in the laboratory a primitive cell, or protocell, that is capable of building, copying and containing DNA.

A geographer from the University of Leicester has produced for the first time a map of the scorched Earth for every year since the turn of the Millennium.

A new model of inner Earth constructed by Arizona State University researchers pulls past information and hypotheses into a coherent story to clarify mantle motion.

The Earth's crust is, on global average around 40 kilometres deep. In relation to the total diameter of the Earth with approx. 12800 kilometres this appears to be rather shallow, but precisely these upper kilometres of the crust, the human habitat, is of special interest for us. Europe's crust shows an astonishing diversity: for example the crust under Finland is as deep as one only expects for crust under a mountain range such as the Alps.

MIT Professor Dara Entekhabi will lead the science team designing a NASA satellite mission to make global soil moisture and freeze/thaw measurements, data essential to the accuracy of weather forecasts and predictions of global carbon cycle and climate. NASA announced recently that the Soil Moisture Active-Passive mission (SMAP) is scheduled to launch December 2012.

Envisat captures the break up of the massive A53A iceberg located just east of the South Georgia Island (visible at image bottom) in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

In a find that sheds light on how Earth-like planets may form, astronomers this week reported finding the first evidence of small, sandy particles orbiting a newborn solar system at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the sun. The report will be published online this week by the journal Nature.