Magma becomes lava when it rises up to the Earth’s surface, like when the Nyiragongo volcano erupted in the Democratic ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

During the nearly 14 months that it has spent on the red planet, Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, has scooped soil, drilled rocks, and analyzed samples by exposing them to laser ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Did the red planet ever host life? It’s a question that’s hard to answer from 250 million miles away, but NASA’s Perseverance rover may have just gotten closer to the answer. Intriguingly, some of ...

Martian mudstones contain features that NASA says are the "clearest sign of life" yet on Mars, according to new findings from ...