Recent discoveries about our planet, its rocks, and other “stone” topics

In 2020, the groundbreaking discovery of freshwater beneath the seafloor was made. This leaking of groundwater from a coastal aquifer into the ocean via basalt layers is a key process, providing a water source for people, and supporting sea life such as fish and algae. Researchers have now shown that electromagnetic imaging CSEM can be used to map such freshwater plumes in high-resolution.
https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2021/03/31/first-images-of-freshwater-plumes-at-sea/
 

On the afternoon of April 13, 2018, a large wave of water surged across Lake Michigan and flooded the shores of beach town of Ludington, Michigan, damaging homes and boat docks, and flooding intake pipes. Scientists reconstructed the event in models and determined this was the first ever documented meteotsunami in the Great Lakes caused by an atmospheric inertia-gravity wave.
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2738/NOAA-research-shows-promise-of-forecasting-weather-driven-tsunamis
 

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is on the brink of discovering the extent of the mess among the surface rock and dust it made on asteroid Bennu during last fall’s sample collection event. On April 07, the spacecraft will get one last close encounter with Bennu as it performs a final flyover in a distance of about 2.3 miles (3.7 km).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-osiris-rexs-final-asteroid-observation-run/
 

Rock art of human figures created over thousands of years in Australia’s Arnhem Land has been put through a transformative machine learning study to analyze style changes over the years. Tested were different styles labelled ‘Northern Running figures’, ‘Dynamic figures’, ‘Post Dynamic figures’ and ‘Simple figures with Boomerangs’ to understand how they relate to one another.
https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2021/04/01/when-rock-art-meets-machine-learning/

(06.04.2021, USA: 04.06.2021)