ETH News

The Department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich has been renamed the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, abbreviated to D-EAPS, effective 1 August. Head of Department Johan Robertsson explains why the renaming was both logical and necessary.

The Morphs are here! The smart, eager-to-learn creatures are now waiting in the ETH main building for players to train them. "Morph Tales - Exploring Artificial Intelligence" is a new game from ETH Zurich that is fun to play and shows how humans and AI master tasks together.

An international research team led by ETH Zurich proposes a new theory for the Earth’s formation. It may also show how other rocky planets were formed.

How the plates of the Earth’s crust move depends largely on the behaviour of the rocks below them in the mantle. A new ETH study now shows that the grain size of these rocks is a key factor.

An international team of researchers led by the ETH Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS have reconstructed the early history of several asteroids more precisely than ever before. Their results indicate that the early solar system was more chaotic than previously thought.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have demonstrated in the lab how well a mineral common at the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle conducts heat. This leads them to suspect that the Earth’s heat may dissipate sooner than previously thought.

In the last application process for the sought-after ERC Starting Grants, the European Research Council made 11 awards to ETH researchers worth about CHF 17 million. Due to Switzerland’s non-association, however, the researchers will not receive these grants. The funds will now be provided by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

Geophysicists can use a new model to explain the behaviour of a tectonic plate sinking into a subduction zone in the Earth’s mantle: the plate becomes weak and thus more deformable when mineral grains on its underside are shrunk in size.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich have been able to use seismic data to look inside Mars for the first time. Marsquakes recorded by NASA’s InSight lander provided information about the structure of the planet’s crust, mantle and core.

Using the extinct niobium-92 atom, ETH researchers have been able to date events in the early solar system with greater precision than before. The study concludes that supernova explosions must have taken place in the birth environment of our sun.

Determining the composition of rock in the deepest layer of the Earth’s mantle is impossible to do directly. But thanks to isotope measurements of volcanic rocks, ETH researchers are now able to show that the mantle is still home to material from the planet’s earliest days.

A team of international scientists led by ETH researcher Paolo Sossi has gained new insights into Earth’s atmosphere of 4.5 billion years ago. Their results have implications for the possible origins of life on Earth.

Researchers from four leading European technical universities, all members of IDEA League, are looking for new solutions against climate change in the EASYGO project.

Current understanding is that the chemical composition of the Earth’s mantle is relatively homogeneous. But experiments conducted by ETH researchers now show that this view is too simplistic. Their results solve a key problem facing the geosciences – and raise some new questions.

Fibre-optic cables are emerging as a valuable tool for geoscientists and glaciologists. They offer a relatively inexpensive way of measuring even the tiniest glacial earthquakes – plus they can also be used to obtain more accurate images of the geological subsurface in earthquake-prone megacities.

Maria Schönbächler investigates how our solar system formed. Her work often reminds her of the importance of breaking out of established patterns.

The university analysts at QS have published their 2020 rankings by subject: ETH Zurich is in the top ten in 13 categories – and has been top in one for several years now.