Geoscience for Everyone

Explore ancient Earth on this GSA Field Trip to Catskill Clastic Wedge in West Virginia, USA.

Summary of research article published in GSA’s journal, Geology, by Li et al. (2026)

Join field trip participants as they explore ~200-million-year-old lake deposits in Connecticut, USA.

Get a sneak peek into what it’s like to attend GSA’s annual meeting, GSA Connects!

Learn how the volcanic island, Isla Coronado, went from lava to biodiversity hotspot.

Hear from GSA members about their geoscience research & how it applies to society.

Learn how geoscientists use core samples and other tools & techniques in research.

Join participants of a field trip to “Xenolith City” near Llano, Texas to learn how these ‘rocks in rocks’ formed!

Did you know the Moon once had a magnetic field as strong as Earth's?

In this Geology Bites episode, Stanford geophysicist Sonia Tikoo discusses how scientists use the magnetic signatures preserved in lunar rocks to reconstruct the Moon's magnetic history.

What allowed avian dinosaurs (birds) to survive the asteroid impact 66 million years ago over non-avian dinosaurs?

In this episode, Steve Brusatte, author of The Story of Birds, explains the story of how birds survived.

Plate tectonics is well-established on modern Earth… But we still don’t know exactly when it started.

In this episode, Alec Brenner discusses the use of paleomagnetism to reconstruct the ancient positions of continents, which helps us understand when tectonic plates may have started moving.

Scientists can't travel to Earth's core—but they can recreate its extreme conditions in the lab. In this episode, Steve Jacobsen explains how lab simulations reveal how rocks and minerals behave deep inside Earth.

Did the giant planets form where they are today—or did they migrate outward from much closer to the Sun? In this episode, Hal Levison explains how NASA's Lucy mission to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids could help answer this question.

The first animals to build reefs weren't corals—they were sponge-like organisms that appeared over 500 million years ago.

In this episode, Sara Pruss explores how these ancient reefs may have fueled the Cambrian Explosion.

Water can transform an ordinary volcanic eruption into an extremely explosive one.

In this episode, Michael Manga explains how interactions between magma and water powered eruptions like the 2022 Hunga Tonga event.

Where does a planet's water come from?

In this episode, Anat Shahar explains how chemical reactions between a young planet's hydrogen atmosphere and molten interior may naturally produce water, suggesting habitable worlds could be more common than we once thought.