Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet's history, challenging current theories about plate tectonics. Researchers have made a new discovery that changes ...

A 410-million-year-old fossil shows ancient lichens were shaping Earth’s surface long before forests took root.

A tree-ringed African lake has yielded a record of Earth's magnetic field spanning the past 150,000 years. A core of rock and sediment drilled from the bottom of Lake Chala, a picturesque crater lake ...

Hidden deep in ancient rocks, scientists have found the surviving traces of Earth’s first form—unchanged for 4.5 billion years.

Life on Earth has always depended on nitrogen. As a building block of proteins and DNA, nitrogen is essential to all living ...

New research reveals that nickel and urea once throttled Earth’s earliest oxygen producers, delaying the planet’s ...

Earth is fortunate in having a magnetic field: it protects the planet and its life from harmful cosmic radiation. Other planets in our solar system—such as Mars—are constantly bombarded by charged ...