Skeptophilia

Some of you may have heard of the Sylacauga meteorite -- a 5.5 kilogram, grapefruit-sized piece of rock that gained more notoriety than mos...

It's remarkably hard to find evidence of impact craters on the Earth. If you're thinking, "What's the difficulty?  Just loo...

In H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying and atmospheric 1927 short story " The Colour Out of Space ," a meteorite strikes near a farmh...

New from the "Well, I Guess  That's A Silver Lining?" department, we have: a massive meteorite collision 3.26 billion years ag...

Tektites  are curious, glassy blobs of rock, from millimeters to centimeters in diameter.  At first thought to be similar to obsidian (volc...

Sometimes the most interesting questions to ask in science are the ones about facts so commonplace that we don't usually even think abou...

One of the topics I keep coming back to here at Skeptophilia is the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.  I have to admit, it'...

I've been interested in rocks since I was a kid.  My dad was a rockhound -- more specifically, a lapidary, who made jewelry from such se...

It's easy to get overwhelmed when you start looking into geology. Both the size scale and the time scale are so immense that it's ha...

Today's post is a scientific puzzle that -- so far -- doesn't have an answer. I'm sure you've all had the lovely experience ...