Monday, 6 January 2025/ Edition 40

Core Elements’ 40th edition has arrived at the beginning of 2025! Happy New Year! And thank you for your readership. Before we jump too far into the year that lies ahead, let’s review some of the main geoscience news and discoveries from 2024.

Rasoul Sorkhabi

Editor, Core Elements

2024 Geoscience News Recap

Photo of Discover magazine cover by Rasoul Sorkhabi

Discover has devoted its January/February 2025 issue to 23 interesting science stories from last year. Here are some related to geoscience.

Lunar geology:

• In January 2024, Japan became the fifth country to reach the Moon. Japan’s SLIM lander sent a large number of photographs of the Moon’s geologic features.

• In February, Texas-based Intuitive Machines became the first commercial company to put a six-legged lander named Odysseus on the Moon.

• In June, China’s Chang’e 6 (“Moon Goddess” in Chinese mythology) took a selfie on the Moon then brought back 2 kg of moonrock back to Earth. It will take years for scientists to analyze these first samples from the far side of the Moon.

Venezuela’s last glacier:

• Due to rising global temperatures, Venezuela’s last glacier, Humboldt Glacier located on Pico Humboldt, shrank to an ice field of less than two hectares.

• At 4,925 meters tall, Pico Humboldt is the second highest peak in Venezuela.

• Note that there is also a Humboldt Glacier in Greenland—both are named after the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

Sinking coasts: Coastal lands are under threat from rising sea levels and subsurface water and petroleum extraction. Two studies published in 2024 document the magnitude of coastal subsidence. 

• One study in Science reports subsidence rates of 0.8 inches per year on China’s coastlines.

• Another study published in PNAS Nexus reported sinking rates of 0.04–0.08-inches per year for North America’s Eastern Seaboard.

An epoch decision on the Anthropocene: In early 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences stated that the term Anthropocene does not qualify as an official name for a specific geologic epoch. We are still in the Holocene, an interglacial epoch that began some 12,000 years ago.

Oldest skin fossil: Soft tissues are rarely fossilized, but Current Biology published a report of several skin impressions alongside patches of carbonized reptilian tissues from the Late Permian (289–286 Ma).

• The fossil was found in a cave in Oklahoma.

• It was preserved in sediments saturated with petroleum and mineral-rich groundwater that slowed down decay.

• The scaly skin of the lizard-like creature appears to be thick.  

Not-so-arctic Alaska: A study published in MDPI Geosciences reports 100-Ma fossilized trunks of gymnosperm trees and tracks from Alaskan dinosaurs and birds, revealing the region to have been warm and wet during mid-Cretaceous times.

Too giant to survive: The ape Gigantopithecus, 10-feet tall and weighing up to 660 pounds, has been recognized as the biggest primate ever to live.

• Gigantopithecus appeared about 2.3 Ma.

• Since the 1930s, nearly 2,000 teeth and jawbones from Gigantopithecus have been found in southern China’s cave deposits. A study of these fossils together with the diet, climate, and ecosystem of southern China reveal that Gigantopithecus was too big to survive the major environmental change from thick forests with abundant fruit to shrubby dry grassland.

• The ape became extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago—roughly 100,000 years more recently than previously believed.

Go deeper: Here is another summary of scientific events in 2024 by Knowable.

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Snowball Earth Honored

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The Kyoto Prize 2024 was given to Paul Hoffman for his pioneering work on the Snowball Earth hypothesis—the idea that Earth was covered with glaciers from its equator to its poles during the Cryogenic period (830–630 Ma).

Career: Hoffman, born in 1941 in Toronto, is a retired Emeritus professor at Harvard University. 

Go deeper: If you want to read a good book about this, I suggest Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth or Hoffman’s paper in Science.

Peter Vail Remembered

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As I was putting together this edition, I learned of the sad loss of one of the greatest geologists of our time, Dr. Peter Vail. Vail was born on January 13, 1930 and died on December 28, 2024.

A big impact: During the 1970s, when Vail worked for Exxon, he developed sequence/seismic stratigraphy, which has been widely used by petroleum geoscientists to interpret seismic sections and explore stratigraphic changes on passive continental margins.

Published work:

• Vail’s first publication in this field (Seismic Stratigraphy: Applications to Hydrocarbon Exploration, AAPG Memoir 26) was published by AAPG in 1977.

• Here is a comprehensive biography of Vail’s work.

Quiz of the Week

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Let’s start with a “wintery” quiz for this year. Technically speaking, we are living in the latest (Quaternary) glacial period. Snowball Earth was not the earliest glaciation. What and when was the Earth’s earliest known glacial period? How did it start and end?

Please send your response by January 9 to editorial@aapg.org (subject line: Core Elements Quiz).

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✉️ To get in touch with Rasoul, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.