geology

Lake Mead is lower than it’s ever been, the result of decades of drought and warmer temperatures caused by climate change. The sinking water levels have revealed a different sort of catastrophe; layers of volcanic ash preserved in stone.

NASA’s Artemis program intends to return humans to the moon after a half-century hiatus. But first, astronauts and engineers have to train and test lifesaving equipment here on Earth. So they’re returning to the same places where Apollo astronauts used to practice fifty years ago—the moonlike lava fields of Northern Arizona. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports.

The rugged, windswept country north of the Grand Canyon is home to the Southern Paiute. About a thousand years ago, it was blasted by a volcanic eruption and covered in a dark, spiky lava flow. Non-Native scientists long assumed that Indigenous people fled from the eruption in fear. But the Southern Paiute have a different story to tell. For them, the Little Springs Lava Flow is a ceremonial landscape.

The Colorado River is young by geologic standards—only five or six million years. But the channel it cuts through the Colorado Plateau exposes rocks that are much older. At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, river runners can spot ancient bedrock that formed nearly two billion years ago. In that vast span of time, the Earth experienced five mass extinctions. But the signs of those cataclysms are mostly hidden.

When Apollo 16 astronauts landed on the moon fifty years ago today, one of their first stops was a crater they named Flag. That’s a secret tribute to Flagstaff, Arizona, where the astronauts did their geology training. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with local space historian Rich Kozak about Flagstaff’s unique connection to Apollo 16. Kozak has amassed a collection of archival tape about the revolutionary moon mission.

The Grand Canyon is full of footprints, not all of them made by people or four-footed animals. Divots in solid rock show where ancient arthropods walked, long ago.

A new study tackles the mystery of the missing rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Scientists call this feature the Great Unconformity. It’s a…

About 30 miles north of Flagstaff sits one of the region’s most magnificent-yet-perplexing geological features. Red Mountain is a cinder cone that formed…

The Flagstaff Festival of Science begins today and it’s all about astronauts. The theme is To the Moon and Beyond in honor of the 50th anniversary of the…

NASA astronaut candidate Jessica Watkins recently came to Flagstaff for geologic field training training along with astronaut Don Pettit. He's spent a…