Geology | The Guardian

Responding to an article by China’s ambassador to the UK, Prof Paul H Cleverley advocates shared openness standards, while Dr Claire Jenkins says British AI can offer a distinctive path Ambassador Zheng Zeguang rightly celebrates openly released AI models, and the Chinese labs behind Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi have led the way – competition that benefits everyone, especially where models can run on …

Long movies | Football and private equity | Dating dinosaurs | Cause of death I have never had a problem with the lack of intervals in screenings of films like the three-hour Andrei Rublev or even the four-hour The Travelling Players ( ‘An intermission is a must’: why Greek cinemas are adding a loo break to The Odyssey, 31 July ). But my DVD of the two-and-a-half-hour 2001: A Space Odyssey contai…

Garrigill, Cumbria: The abandoned Tynebottom mine is alive with vivid orange, raspberry-ripple pink and sulphurous yellow. But it’s the cave pearls that captivate me most At first I can’t believe that there’s a way in, the entrance is so hidden by downy willow, ferns and field rush. Just a trickle of rusty water hints at the opening to an abandoned mine. That we have to push through scrub to ente…

Geochronologists say basalt columns in Antrim sprang up during volcanic activity over 5.5m years – 8m less than thought For centuries, the tale has been passed from generation to generation: how the Irish giant Finn McCool built the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland to fight Benandonner, his Scottish rival, by hurling chunks of the Antrim coastline into the sea. Now, scientists have revealed i…

Tectonic plate movements over millions of years have lifted and tilted the layers, with records of ancient earthquakes in the rocks Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Microscopic fossils embedded in limestone have helped reveal the true age of Victoria’s Twelve Apostles as 8.6m to 14m years old. The conclave of giant…

Analysis of video footage reveals how wave changed as it travelled over mud-rich rice paddies, exerting more force It is just over 15 years since the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing almost 20,000 people and triggering the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Fresh analysis of video footage of the wave has revealed that the mud-rich coastline made the tsunami far mor…

In the holiday hotspots of the Costa del Sol, the risks are rarely mentioned. But in neighbouring Cádiz, the country’s first tsunami-ready town is leading by example Even on a wet, wintry day in Málaga, the Mediterranean looks benign. But only 25 miles (40km) south-west of its port, where half a million tourists disembark from cruise ships into the Costa del Sol each year, lies a system of tecton…

The more than 70 bat species living in the Mozambican reserve’s labyrinth of caves play a key role in maintaining a fragile ecosysytem that benefits wildlife and people • Words and photographs by Kang-Chun Cheng After wriggling gingerly into a damp, cool cave, Raúl da Silva Armando Chomela waits for his eyes to adjust. Donning latex gloves, a helmet fitted with a headlamp, and a mask to protect h…

Sinkholes, storm drains, manmade labs miles underground … this documentary, based on Robert Macfarlane’s book, burrows deep into some of humanity’s great unknowns There are some arresting questions and potent images in Rob Petit’s ruminative essay-documentary Underland, based on Robert Macfarlane’s bestselling book of the same name about the spaces under the Earth’s surface and what they tell us …

Researchers believe rock samples taken from the Apollo missions gave scientists a misleading impression How magnetic is the moon? Analysis of rock samples from the Apollo missions suggested that the moon had an extremely strong magnetic field in its early history – even stronger than Earth’s. But no one could figure out how such a small planetary body could have such a strong field. Now a fresh s…

We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2022: A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise By Daniel Immerwahr. Read by…

Stone lifting | A good result | Gorton and Denton lessons | Metres v millions I must disagree with Prof Gray ( Letters, 20 February ) as to the origin of the rounded shapes of the boulders used in the ancient sport of stone lifting in Ireland. They are unlikely to be glacial erratics. Blocks frozen in glacial ice generally retain their initial angular shape and are not abraded. In contrast, rock …

Researchers discover rare periods of a few thousands years when climate unexpectedly awoke from slumber During the ”snowball Earth” period about 700m years ago, Earth’s climate shut down. The planet was encased in ice and insulated from seasonal variations: spring, summer, autumn and winter all stopped. Or at least that was the theory. Recent examination of some ancient rocks from the west coast …

My father, Desmond McConnell, who has died aged 95, made a great contribution to mineralogy, inspiring scientists around the world. At Cambridge University in the 1960s and 70s, with the excellent X-ray diffraction facilities in the Mineralogy Department, he developed work first published by his crystallographer colleagues, Peter Gay and Mike Bown, on the incommensurate behaviour (ie falling outs…

Researchers say waste dumping and climate breakdown have contributed to rise in brick, concrete and glass on beaches As much as half of some British beaches’ coarse sediments may consist of human-made materials such as brick, concrete, glass and industrial waste, a study has suggested. Climate breakdown, which has caused more frequent and destructive coastal storms, has led to an increase in thes…

Island’s mineral and resource wealth is result of mountain building, rifting and volcanic activity over 4bn years As recent manoeuvres over Greenland have made plain, this mostly ice-covered island contains some of the greatest stores of natural resources in the world, with huge volumes of oil and gas, rich deposits of rare-earth elements and rocks bearing gems and gold. So why did all the planet…

The city’s architecture travels through time and continents, incorporating everything from slabs of the Italian Alps to meteorites that hit southern Africa 2bn years ago In the heart of London’s Square Mile, between the windows of a tapas restaurant, a 150m-year-old ammonite stares mutely at passersby. The fossil is embedded in a limestone wall on Plantation Lane, sitting alongside the remnants o…