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Wednesday 7 November 2018 officially launches the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) for the pooling and streamlining of data and services of all kinds for the study of our planet. This initiative, for which the CNRS and BRGM are working together with the French Ministry for Higher Education, Research and Innovation, in part aims to better understand the mechanisms behind earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

By studying calcium in fossil remains in deposits in Morocco and Niger, researchers have been able to reconstruct the food chains of the past, thus explaining how so many predators could coexist in the dinosaurs' time.

An international team of researchers 1 , including a CNRS researcher at the department of Écologie et Dynamique des Systèmes Anthropisés (CNRS / Université de Picardie Jules Verne) has observed an acceleration in the increase of biodiversity on mountain peaks in Europe.

Fields, streets and cities, but also forests planted in rank and file, and dead straight rivers: humans shape nature to better suit their purposes, and not only since the onset of industrialization. Such influences are well documented in the Amazonian rainforest. On the other hand, the influence of humans was debated in Central Africa where major interventions seem to have occurred there 2,600 years ago: Potsdam geoscientist Yannick Garcin and his team have published a report on their findings in the journal PNAS.

You may already be surprised to hear there are iron objects dating back to the Bronze Age, but their meteorite origin is even more astonishing. Though meteorites had already been recognized as one source of this metal, the scientific community couldn't determine whether they accounted for most or simply a few Bronze Age iron artifacts.

After an earthquake, there is a disturbance in the field of gravity almost instantaneously. This could be recorded before the seismic waves that seismologists usually analyze. In a study published in Science on December 1, 2017, a team formed of researchers from CNRS, IPGP, the Université Paris Diderot 1 and Caltech has managed to observe these weak signals related to gravity and to understand where they come from.

In 2009, the world's largest dinosaur tracks were discovered in the French village of Plagne, in the Jura Mountains. Since then, a series of excavations at the site has uncovered other tracks, sprawling over more than 150 meters. They form the longest sauropod trackway ever to be found.

A new method used to perform geochemical analysis of fossilized eggs from China has shown that oviraptorosaurs incubated their eggs with their bodies within a 35–40° C range, similar to extant birds today. This finding is the result of Franco-Chinese collaboration coordinated by Romain Amiot of the Laboratoire de géologie de Lyon: Terre, planètes et environnement (CNRS/ENS de Lyon/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1).

Two studies on calcium isotopes 1 in teeth have provided new insights into both the extinction of the dinosaurs and weaning age in humans. The findings of these studies, conducted by CNRS researchers at Lyon ENS and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, were published, respectively, on 25 and 30 May 2017 in Current Biology and PNAS .

Seven temperate Earth-sized planets revolve around the star TRAPPIST-1. In addition, at least three of them harbor conditions compatible with the presence of liquid water on their surfaces.

An international group of researchers led by LSCE (CEA-CNRS-UVSQ) has published a thorough budget of methane sources and sinks 1 over the last decade in the Earth System Science Data (ESSD) journal,

Past variations in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field are reflected by the production of isotopes in the atmosphere.

Mega-earthquakes (with a magnitude greater than 8.5) mainly occur on subduction faults where one tectonic plate passes under another. But the probability of such earthquakes does not appear to be even across these zones. In a study published on 25 November 2016 in the journal Science , researchers from the University of Oregon and Géoazur laboratory (CNRS/Université Nice Sophia Antipolis/Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur/IRD) show that mega-earthquakes mostly occur on the flattest subduction zones.

The fall of an asteroid in the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico) 66 million years ago is believed to have caused the extinction of dinosaurs. It also created the Chicxulub impact crater, the only such crater on Earth that still has a peak ring – a type of structure commonly found, in contrast, on the surface of several objects in the Solar System.

Why did the rhythm of glaciations suddenly slow down about a million years ago? To answer this question and to better forecast future climate change, a consortium of researchers from 14 institutions

Released by the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) of the ESA ExoMars mission, the Schiaparelli module is about to land on the red planet this Wednesday, October 19th, 2016 at 4:48 p.m. (Paris time).

In subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another, slow, imperceptible slip, known as 'slow earthquakes' or 'slow slip events', can trigger powerful quakes a little further away. This has just been shown by researchers from CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes and IRD, in collaboration with colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

What is the origin of the large heart-shaped nitrogen glacier revealed in 2015 on Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft? Two researchers from the Laboratoire de météorologie dynamique (CNRS/École polytechnique/UPMC/ENS Paris) 1 show that Pluto's peculiar insolation and atmosphere favor nitrogen condensation near the equator, in the lower altitude regions, leading to an accumulation of ice at the bottom of Sputnik Planum, a vast topographic basin.

To monitor a segment of the North Anatolian seismic fault near Istanbul, an international team of researchers, in particular from CNRS and Université de Bretagne Occidentale, has installed a network of transponders on the floor of the Sea of Marmara. The aim is to measure motion of the sea floor on either side of this segment.