Kris Wang is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where he is studying geosciences with a focus on volcanology and igneous petrology.

Outcrops in the Thurston Island area of West Antarctica consist primarily of plutonic rocks that range in composition from gabbro to granite and yield isotopic dates from 347 to 97 Ma. They intrude ...

Scientists on NASA's Perseverance mission made a surprising discovery about the composition of rock in Jezero Crater, one that will help them get a better idea of when water existed on Mars, and ...

THE closing years of the nineteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in the petrology of gneous rocks, which must be regarded as marking an important stage in the development of that subject.

Igneous rocks are formed when molten rock (magma) cools and solidifies, with or without crystallization, either below the surface as intrusive (plutonic) rocks or on the surface as extrusive (volcanic ...

T o the untrained eye, the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC), in northeastern South Africa, is kind of unassuming. It’s roughly the same size as West Virginia – or, for metric users, the Republic of ...

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 ...

The rover collected exciting rock samples on the first leg of its epic journey. Next, it will turn towards an ancient river delta to look for past life. Instead, Perseverance has spent the year ...

One main goal of NASA's Mars 2020 mission is to determine when conditions on the planet were conducive to the formation of liquid water. Hence the target Jezero crater, seemingly a lakebed with a ...

We often talk about climate change, melting glaciers, or strange landforms. But we rarely think about something that’s always around us– rocks. They don’t make the news, but they’re everywhere. We ...