The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes.

There’s a saying in mine country, the kind that sometimes shows up on bumper stickers: “If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined.” Before mining can ever start, though, there has to be ore in the ...

The spectacular columns of Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland look like an architectural marvel, but the formation is entirely natural. It developed between 50 to 60 million years ago when a flood ...