Ancient Earth globe

Lifelike reconstruction of Julius Caesar reveals extraordinary head (PHOTO) A new 3D reconstruction of Julius Caesar’s head gives unprecedented insight into what the famous Roman general looked like all those years ago - including the bizarre proportions of his cranium. The bust was revealed at an event to promote a new book on Caesar by archaeologist Tom Buijtendorp at at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, on Friday. Buijtendorp came up with the idea of recreating Caesar’s head based on a marble bust of the ancient Roman leader that’s held at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. READ MORE: ‘Comprehensive slaughter’: Barbarian savagery unearthed in 1,000yo bones (PHOTOS) Archaeologist and anthropologist Maja d’Hollosy brought the bust to life, using a 3D scan of the marble piece before drawing on other existing portraits of Caesar to fill in gaps where the marble was damaged.

Mapping Ancient Oceans - GeoLog incl tectonic plates animation An example of a new map identifying potential chunks of ancient oceans now located deep inside Earth. A vote map at 1400 km depth has been projected to the surface, and is overlain with the position of the continents (grey-white) at around 120 Million years ago. Credit: G Shephard (CEED/UiO) using GPlates software. This guest post is by Dr Grace Shephard, a postdoctoral researcher in tectonics and geodynamics at the Centre of Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo, Norway. This blog entry describes the latest findings of a study that maps deep remnants of past oceans.

A wrench in Earth's engine: Stagnant slabs Researchers at CU Boulder report that they may have solved a geophysical mystery, pinning down the likely cause of a phenomenon that resembles a wrench in the engine of the planet. In a study published today in Nature Geoscience, the team explored the physics of “stagnant slabs.” These geophysical oddities form when huge chunks of Earth’s oceanic plates are forced deep underground at the edges of certain continental plates. The chunks sink down into the planet’s interior for hundreds of miles until they suddenly — and for reasons scientists can’t explain — stop like a stalled car. CU Boulder’s Wei Mao and Shijie Zhong, however, may have found the reason for that halt. Using computer simulations, the researchers examined a series of stagnant slabs in the Pacific Ocean near Japan and the Philippines.

Cosmic pile-up gives glimpse of how planets are made Image copyright NASA Astronomers say they have the first evidence of a head-on collision between two planets in a distant star system. They believe two objects smacked into each other to produce an iron-rich world, with nearly 10 times the mass of Earth. Find Your 2,000-Year-Old Dopplegänger Do you look more like the goddess Aphrodite or the god Apollo? A Canadian museum thinks it may have the answer. For its upcoming exhibition “My 2,000-Year-Old Double,” the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City, Canada, is inviting people from around the world to upload their own photos in an effort to find their ancient dopplegängers. Those with the closest matches will then be featured as part of the museum’s exhibition, which is slated to premiere next autumn. Here’s how it works.

What planet Earth might look like when the next supercontinent forms – four scenarios The outer layer of the Earth, the solid crust we walk on, is made up of broken pieces, much like the shell of a broken egg. These pieces, the tectontic plates, move around the planet at speeds of a few centimetres per year. Every so often they come together and combine into a supercontinent, which remains for a few hundred million years before breaking up. The plates then disperse or scatter and move away from each other, until they eventually – after another 400-600 million years – come back together again. The last supercontinent, Pangea, formed around 310 million years ago, and started breaking up around 180 million years ago. It has been suggested that the next supercontinent will form in 200-250 million years, so we are currently about halfway through the scattered phase of the current supercontinent cycle.

*****How Firing Lead At Dust Clumps is Informing Our Theory of Planetary Formation (Left) Picture of the laboratory drop tower. (Right) The expansion of granular clusters from impact. (Credit: Hiroaki Katsuragi and Jürgen Blum) By firing plastic, lead and glass projectiles into clumps of dust, researchers are improving our understanding of how planets form in the universe. Cornwall and south Devon 'originally part of mainland Europe' With what can only be described as unfortunate timing, researchers have discovered that there is a corner of Britain that will forever belong to mainland Europe. Analysis of rock from deep beneath the ground reveals that the UK only acquired Cornwall and parts of south Devon when it was struck by the landmass bearing what is now France some hundreds of millions of years ago. Geologists at Plymouth University ran chemical tests on solidified magma that welled up long ago from a depth of 100km, to understand the makeup of the rock that underpins the south-west of the country.

theconversation Earth’s crust is made up of fractured slabs of rock, like a broken shell on an egg. These plates move around at speeds of about 5cm per year – and eventually this movement brings all the continents together and form what is known as a supercontinent. The last supercontinent on Earth was Pangaea, which existed between 300-180m years ago. This collection and dispersion of the continents is known as a supercontinent cycle, and the world now is 180m years into the current cycle. It is predicted that the next supercontinent will form in about 250m years, when the Atlantic and Pacific oceans both close and a new ocean forms where the large Asian plate splits. Because the plates move around, ocean basins change their shape and size. Continental interiors may not be as tectonically stable as geologists think A University of Illinois-led team has identified unexpected geophysical signals underneath tectonically stable interiors of South America and Africa. The data suggest that geologic activity within stable portions of Earth's uppermost layer may have occurred more recently than previously believed. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, challenge some of today's leading theories regarding plate tectonics. The most ancient rocks on Earth are located within continental interiors, far from active tectonic boundaries where rocks recycle back into the planet's interior.

What Really Happens When Earth’s Magnetic Field Flips? Many times over our planet’s history, Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed, meaning that sometimes a compass pointing north will be aimed at Antarctica rather than the Arctic. This might sound strange, but it’s a relatively predictable quirk. Powered by the machinations of the planet’s spinning iron core, this process of geomagnetic reversal has been doing its thing without much fanfare for eons. That is, until this week, when a book excerpt describing the phenomenon appeared online. Geothermal gradient Geothermal gradient is the rate of increasing temperature with respect to increasing depth in the Earth’s interior. Away from tectonic plate boundaries, it is about 25 °C per km of depth (1 °F per 70 feet of depth) near the surface in most of the world. Strictly speaking, geo-thermal necessarily refers to the Earth but the concept may be applied to other planets.

What happens when you pull the plug on the Marianas Trench Reddit user: Vinnytsia The Mariana Trench or Marianas Trench is the deepest part of the world's oceans. It is located in the western Pacific Ocean, an average of 200 kilometers (124 mi) to the east of the Mariana Islands, in the Western Pacific East of Philippines. It is a crescent-shaped scar in the Earth's crust, and measures about 2,550 km (1,580 mi) long and 69 km (43 mi) wide on average.