Geological History of Earth

Scientists with a new theory about how Earth's early continents formed predicted where a superold impact crater should be—then found it

A massive flood called the Zanclean megaflood ended the Messinian salinity crisis, which lasted between 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago, according to new research led by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

To be considered active, a volcano must have erupted at some point during the Holocene, but dormant and extinct are a little harder to define.

Plate tectonics is not something most people would associate with Mars. In fact, the planet's dead core is one of the primary reasons for its famous lack of a magnetic field. And since active planetary cores are one of the primary driving factors of plate tectonics, it seems obvious why that general conception holds.

Here on Earth, one of the greatest geological wonders of all is the Grand Canyon. Carved by the Colorado River over millions of years, which connected multiple older segments of the canyon together…

Here we explore whether there are any upcoming asteroid encounters and how NASA and other space agencies actively monitor near-Earth asteroids that have the potential to hit our planet.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Seismologists have recognized since the 1970s that two mysterious continent-sized blobs reside in the deepest part of Earth's mantle...

Dr. Michael Mann on climate science and skepticism, deep Earth history and his new book "Our Fragile Moment"

Her tour has rivaled the Olympics in economic scale and an earthquake in its power.

Pink diamonds are extremely rare and coveted. But a discovery made in Western Australia near a now-closed mine may help reveal new deposits of the jewels...

North would become South, South would become North. Is it as trippy as it sounds?

The rocks on Earth are not all the same age. In fact, most are significantly younger than the planet itself. The oldest sections of the oceanic crust are thought to be 200 million years old—a blink of an eye in the planet's billion-year lifespan. What is going on here?

NASA's Apollo missions already sent astronauts to the moon from 1969 to 1972. But scientists say there's still lots of good science to do there. The moon also could be an ideal stepping stone to Mars.

Earth's geological history is characterized by many dynamic climate shifts that are often associated with large changes in temperature. These environmental shifts can lead to trait changes, such as body size, that can be directly observed using the fossil record.

The dinosaur-killing meteor hit in spring. That is the conclusion of scientists who examined the bones of fish that died on that day when a 6-mile-wide...

A newly-deployed satellite has created the most-detailed map yet of the ocean floor, finding hundreds of hills and underwater volcanoes that were previously missed.

Morocco's Lala Lallia—one of the world's oldest known 'star dunes'—is slowly inching west.

A giant collision between the ancient protoplanet Theia and the proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago may have formed Earth's Moon as well as two continent-sized regions within Earth's mantle.

A team of astrophysicists at the University of Toronto (U of T) has revealed how the slow and steady lengthening of Earth's day caused by the tidal pull of the moon was halted for over a billion years.

What do Mars and Iceland have in common? These days, not so much. But more than 4.5 billion years ago, it's possible the Red Planet had a crust comparable to Iceland today. This discovery, hidden in the oldest martian fragments found on Earth, could provide information about our planet that was lost over billions of years of geological movement and could help explain why the Earth developed into a planet that…