Magma becomes lava when it rises up to the Earth’s surface, like when the Nyiragongo volcano erupted in the Democratic Republic Congo in 2020. Igneous rocks are formed when magma and lava solidify.

There are three types of rock found on Earth. These are igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary. Each rock type is formed in a different way. For example, the rock malachite is mostly made of the ...

In the crash-car derby between heavy and light isotopes vying for the coolest spots as magma turns to solid rock, weightier isotopes have an edge, research led by Case Western Reserve University shows ...

In my last column, I wrote about the locations where you can find igneous rocks that were formed from lava. The metarhyolite and metabasalt described in the column are known as extrusive rocks, those ...

While many rocks don’t burn, some of them do. It depends on what the rocks are made of – and that’s related to how they were formed. Rocks that burn when they get heated up are combusting. This means ...

Scientists got a surprise when NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover began examining rocks on the floor of Jezero Crater in spring of 2021: Because the crater held a lake billions of years ago, they had ...

A rock on Mars being studied by NASA's Curiosity rover is unlike any Martian stone ever seen, and is surprisingly similar to an unusual, but well-known, kind of rock on Earth. This type of rock is the ...