The mountain-building processes of folding and faulting take many millennia on Earth—and a matter of minutes in the lab. Learn how even small models provide a big-picture view of our dynamic world.

Don't let the "paleo" in "paleoseismology" fool you. In the world of earthquakes, "ancient" translates to "before the 20th century"—before instruments were used to record earthquakes.

If you want an idea of the conditions on Mars, journey to Antarctica. Take a close look at the work of an astrobiologist studying Antarctica's valleys, the "most Mars-like places on Earth."

At the bottom of the ocean, how do scientists find their way around? This marine geologist's work includes helping to create accurate, high-resolution maps of the sea floor.

Beneath the glacier-clad summit of Mt. Rainier lies an active volcano, which has more than once produced enough molten rock to bury an area the size of Tacoma and Seattle combined almost 10 feet under.

Why did museum scientists travel to the Sahara to retrieve a boulder? This stromatolite was built by microbes, the only life that existed on Earth until about a billion years ago.

By taking biopsy-like samples from centuries-old Siberian pines, scientists have reconstructed a 300-year record of temperature changes for the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere.

The intense heat and pressure of the deep Earth are hard to imagine—and even harder to re-create. Currently, scientists need to work with samples so small they look like a grain of ground pepper.

The mineral zircon serves as a tiny time capsule, recording geologic events—it's especially useful because the oldest discovered grains (4.2 billion to 4.3 billion years old) are not much younger than the Earth itself.