On August 10, 2025, a colossal landslide in Tracy Arm fjord unleashed a half-kilometer high mega-tsunami. Newly released photos reveal the scale of destruction and the science behind one of the largest landslide-generated waves in modern history.
Queensland has been shaken by its strongest earthquake in half a century. The magnitude 5.6 tremor struck near Kilkivan, west of Gympie, and was felt across Brisbane, Bundaberg, the Gold Coast and even into northern New South Wales. It is a rare reminder that even Australia’s most stable state is not immune to powerful geological forces.
The flood arrived under cover of darkness. It hit with a sound like thunder, a great rushing roar. When the rising water came into view, it was taller than the cottonwoods along the river—a wall of water, shining and white-capped in the glare of search-and-rescue helicopters.
During the Triassic Period, Australia and Antarctica were joined as part of Gondwana. Powerful braided rivers carried quartz-rich sand from highlands in East Antarctica across a vast connected landscape, through what is now Tasmania and Victoria, and into the Sydney Basin. Over millions of years, these deposits became the Hawkesbury Sandstone, the golden rock that now shapes Sydney’s cliffs, valleys, and harbor foreshores.
For centuries, the dream of turning base metals into gold belonged to alchemists and their mythical Philosopher’s Stone. Today, that dream may have found a home in the heart of a fusion reactor. Marathon Fusion claims its innovative design could transform mercury into pure gold while simultaneously generating clean, limitless energy — a marriage of ancient ambition and cutting-edge science.
The expansive Western District volcanic plains stretch across southwest Victoria, a flat and windswept region capped by volcanic basalt flows. Although largely void of gold at the surface, buried beneath the basalt cover could be a different story: original goldfields, obscured by lava for millions of years. These hidden riches, potentially rivaling the exposed goldfields further north in origin and richness, remain tantalizingly out of reach.
South-east of Melbourne lies one of Australia’s most remarkable extraterrestrial discoveries — the Cranbourne meteorite field. Scattered across the basalt plains of Victoria, these massive iron meteorites are fragments of a colossal asteroid that fell to Earth thousands of years ago.
The first recorded discovery came in 1854, when settlers unearthed an enormous metallic mass while ploughing farmland. Over time, more pieces were found — some weighing over 3 tonnes — making Cranbourne home to one of the world’s largest known iron meteorites.
Composed primarily of iron and nickel, these meteorites display the striking Widmanstätten pattern when cut and polished, revealing their slow crystallisation within the core of a long-destroyed planetary body. For the Boonwurrung people, the meteorites were already part of their cultural landscape long before European settlement.
Today, most of the Cranbourne meteorites reside in museums and collections, but their story remains a spectacular link between Victoria’s volcanic plains and the wider cosmos.
Local legend claims that Reedy Creek’s gold was carried down from distant mountains by ancient glaciers. It’s a romantic story—but geologically impossible.
Victoria, Australia, has never been covered by continental glaciers large enough to transport gold-bearing gravels over such vast distances. The gold at Reedy Creek is instead the product of localised erosion from nearby quartz reefs, part of the region’s Paleozoic goldfields formed during the Devonian–Carboniferous orogenies. Over millions of years, weathering released gold from bedrock, allowing it to wash into the creek beds where miners later found it.
Geological mapping shows no evidence of glacial striations in the Reedy Creek area. Instead, the sediment layers match typical alluvial systems, where gold has been concentrated by stream action, not by ice. The truth is less mythical but far more fascinating—a story of local geology, erosion, and the steady hand of running water shaping one of Victoria’s most famous gold-bearing streams.
Beneath the waves of Bass Strait lies the Bassian Plain, a vast submerged shelf that once connected mainland Australia to Tasmania. During the last ice age, when sea levels were over 120 metres lower, this area formed a land bridge across which plants, animals, and early humans migrated.
Stretching between Victoria and Tasmania, the Bassian Plain is part of the Southeast Australian continental shelf, composed of ancient sediments and marine deposits. Today, it’s covered by relatively shallow waters averaging only 50 metres deep, but sonar mapping reveals old river channels and dune systems frozen in time beneath the seafloor.
This sunken landscape is crucial for understanding past climate changes, human migration routes, and marine biodiversity. It’s both a geological archive and an underwater ecosystem rich with marine life, shaped by powerful currents and seasonal upwellings.
Deep in the heart of the Northern Territory lies Gosses Bluff, known to the Western Arrernte people as Tnorala. This striking ring-shaped mountain range, 22 km across, is the eroded remnant of a massive asteroid impact that occurred around 142 million years ago during the early Cretaceous.
Originally, the impact crater may have been up to 24 km wide and several kilometres deep. Over millions of years, erosion has stripped away much of the original structure, leaving a dramatic central uplift—a feature common in large impact craters. The bluff’s distinctive circular form is visible even from space.
For the Western Arrernte people, Tnorala holds deep cultural significance, woven into Dreamtime stories that speak of a fallen star. Scientifically, it offers an invaluable window into Earth’s violent past and the role of cosmic impacts in shaping our planet’s surface.
A wave of media hype has recently misrepresented the Melanesian Border Plateau as a looming supervolcano. But geologists aren’t buying it.
Located northeast of Australia, this vast underwater plateau is indeed volcanic in origin—but it’s not a hidden Yellowstone. The Melanesian Border Plateau is the product of hotspot volcanism and back-arc tectonics, forming mostly during the Cenozoic era through scattered submarine eruptions and seafloor spreading.
Unlike true supervolcanoes, which are defined by catastrophic caldera-forming eruptions ejecting over 1,000 km³ of material, the plateau shows no such eruptive history. Instead, it's a diffuse volcanic province, more comparable to the Ontong Java Plateau or Hikurangi Plateau, both massive yet stable oceanic features.
So no, it’s not about to erupt and end the world. It's a fascinating volcanic relic—but not an apocalyptic threat.
In the late 19th century, gold recovery was revolutionized by a chemical breakthrough: cyanide leaching. Before this innovation, miners could only extract gold efficiently from rich, visible ore. Fine gold locked in sulfides or low-grade ores was often discarded as waste.
That changed in 1887, when Scottish chemists John MacArthur, Robert, and William Forrest patented the cyanide process. This method allowed gold to be dissolved from crushed ore using a dilute cyanide solution—a far more efficient and scalable process than mercury amalgamation or gravity separation.
The impact was immense. Cyanide made low-grade deposits economically viable, triggered global gold rushes, and remains at the core of gold mining operations today. While effective, the process also raised new environmental and safety concerns, leading to modern regulations and alternatives like thiosulfate and glycine leaching.
