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A team of researchers has discovered ice crystals in a diamond. Probably not a huge discovery, you may think, but this ice, names Ice-VII, is coming from the Earth’s mantle and has been supposed, until now, that it only naturally exists on other planets and their moons and can only be made in a lab.

The discovery of Ice VII in mantle diamonds suggests the possibility of the Earth having water pockets in the mantle. What could this mean, and why is this important?

Supervolcanoes have the power to cough up enough ash to coat entire continents. They emit waves of hot gas, rocks and ash that flow down their slopes at speeds so great they strip away vegetation and kill anyone in their path. And they carve vast depressions in the planet, leaving permanent scars.

Imagine a year in Africa that summer never arrives. The sky takes on a gray hue during the day and glows red at night. Flowers do not bloom. Trees die in the winter. Large mammals like antelope become thin, starve and provide little fat to the predators (carnivores and human hunters) that depend on them. Then, this same disheartening cycle repeats itself, year after year. This is a picture of life on earth after the eruption of the super-volcano, Mount Toba in Indonesia, about 74,000 years ago. In a paper published this week in Nature, scientists show that early modern humans on the coast of South Africa thrived through this event.

Deep within the hot interior of the planet, ice lurks. Now, a form of super-compact ice, found embedded in diamonds, offers the first direct clue that there is abundant water more than 610 kilometers deep in the mantle.

Small pockets of water exist deep beneath Earth’s surface, according to an analysis of diamonds belched from hundreds of kilometers within our planet. The work, which also identifies a weird form of crystallized water known as ice VII, suggests that material may circulate more freely at some depths within Earth than previously thought. Geophysical models of that flow, which ultimately influences the frequency of earthquakes driven by the scraping of tectonic plates at Earth’s surface, may need to be substantially tweaked, scientists say. Such models also help scientists estimate the long-term rates of heat flow through Earth’s surface and into space.

Trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds formed deep in the Earth's crust, scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet.

Spring time is upon us and that means allergies. 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ's Pollen Program researchers study everyday ways to help you say good bye to those springtime sneezes. With their help, learn what plants affect you and what parts of the valley to avoid.

Researchers with 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ 's Pollen Monitoring Program expect a high pollen count across the Las Vegas valley.

New research from 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ shows just what allergens are lurking in which neighborhoods.

The Curiosity rover made big news in late 2014 when it first detected organic matter on Mars. But in detailed studies of the sites in Gale Crater studied by Curiosity, called Yellowknife Bay and Sheepbed Mudstone, the concentration of organic molecules were much lower than scientists had expected.

An unprecedented number of scientists have their sights set on various U.S. political posts in 2018. Their hope? Preventing the nation from contributing to environmental destruction by way of willful ignorance. Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his cohorts have made a habit of mocking and flat-out denying the legitimacy of climate change with attempts to derail crucial conversations surrounding the protection and preservation of natural resources.