Roughly 4.5 billion years ago, the young solar system was a swirling cloud of gas and dust that formed the first asteroids ...

Millions of years before blue oceans and wandering continents, the Earth in its early days was a molten, tumultuous planet — ...

Deep rock samples from Greenland, Canada, Hawaii reveal remnants of planet’s 4.5-billion-year-old precursor, offering new ...

A long-lost landmass, mostly hidden beneath the waves of the South Pacific Ocean, has taken a major step toward full ...

The appearance of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere was a turning point in the history of our planet, forever transforming the ...

Throughout most of Earth's geological history, its paleoclimate has remained hospitable to life—largely thanks to continental ...

Scientists at MIT have uncovered compelling evidence that ancient sea sponges were Earth's first animals. Chemical fossils ...

From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just outside Tucson, Arizona, ...

Evolution has long been a topic of controversy in the United States and has been the target of laws and public policies. As part of the Origins Science Scholars series, Kenneth Miller of Brown ...

A new study examines nickel and urea in early microbial habitats, showing how ancient cyanobacteria adapted to their chemical ...

High-resolution isotope data show that a modern-like, oxygen-rich atmosphere was not established until 410 million years ago, supporting a 2-billion-year transitional oxygenation of Earth’s surface.