For more than a quarter billion years, coral reefs did far more than brighten shallow seas. Long before humans appeared, ...

National Research Council (U.S.) Board on Earth Sciences and Resources "The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising mechanism that may explain how Earth cooled dramatically after the age of dinosaurs.

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

1. Introduction -- 2. The great cooling -- 3. Ice age cycles -- 4. Trace gases warm the planet -- 5. Moving continents and dating rocks -- 6. Mapping past climates -- 7. Into the icehouse -- 8. The ...

The Cambrian Explosion in which life on Earth underwent massive diversification was likely triggered by eccentricities in Earth’s orbit around our Sun. Or so say the authors of a new paper just ...

To spread awareness that “climate change isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a human story woven into the fabric of our civilization’s rise and fall,” Georgetown University historian Professor ...

The cycling of water within Earth's interior regulates plate tectonics, volcanism, ocean volume, and climate stability, ...

Earth is surrounded by an immense magnetic field, called the magnetosphere. Generated by powerful, dynamic forces at the center of our world, our magnetosphere shields us from erosion of our ...