Tag Archives: Geology

2 million years earlier than thought: Bonn researchers date the appearance of flowering plants more precisely

By | May 21
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Credits: Heimhofer, LUH

They are tiny, yet a veritable source of Earth's history: pollen grains are usually just 20 micrometers, or 0,02 millimeters, in size. Using these minute particles, a research team from Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) and the University of Bonn has now succeeded in significantly pinpointing the earliest appearance of flowering plants, so-called angiosperms. Previously, it was assumed that… Read more »

Earlier than thought: The Arabian Desert was already forested 8 million years ago

By | April 10, 2025
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Credits: Hubert Vonhof, MPI for Chemistry

Mineral deposits from dripstone caves show that the interior of present-day Saudi Arabia was repeatedly humid and green for shorter periods over the past eight million years. An international team led by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, with the support of the Saudi Cultural Heritage Commission and the Saudi Ministry of Culture, was able to reconstruct the climate of the Arabian Desert using isotope analyses.… Read more »

The temporal sequence before the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary has been deciphered

By | March 10, 2025
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Credits: Tomáš Malík, pexels

An international team of scientists has synchronized important geological climate archives from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans more precisely than ever before. This allowed the researchers to decipher the chronological sequence of events during the last million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. The geochemical data reveal for the first time when and how two major volcanic eruption phases, known as flood basalt events, occurred… Read more »