A series of severe environmental crises in the oceans, spanning 185 to 85 million years ago, significantly altered the course of evolution on Earth. This "tag-team" between the oceans and continents ...

Like many of us, Earth bears old pockmarks. Our planet’s crust has a band of ancient craters that formed around 465 million years ago. The divots were created at a time when animals in the seas were ...

Russell has a PhD in the history of medicine, violence, and colonialism. His research has explored topics including ethics, science governance, and medical involvement in violent contexts. Russell has ...

The cool conditions which have allowed ice caps to form on Earth are rare events in the planet's history and require many complex processes working at once, according to new research. A team of ...

Research has uncovered important new insights into the evolution of oxygen, carbon, and other vital elements over the entire history of Earth -- and it could help assess which other planets can ...

Cosmic events like asteroid impacts or supernovae could destroy life on Earth. Our Sun is gradually getting hotter, eventually boiling Earth's oceans. Life on Earth is not permanent; it will end due ...

During a brief but dramatic chapter in Earth's history about 41,000 years ago, the planet’s magnetic field nearly collapsed. What followed was a cascade of environmental and biological changes that ...

Top panel shows reconstructed sediment fluxes to the oceans vs diversity of marine animals. Bottom panel shows sediment cover in continental regions vs the long-term trend in land-plant diversity.

According to the Gaia hypothesis, life created Earth—or at least the Earth we know today. This theory, first formulated by chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s, was a hit with the media and the public ...