Earth news stories

If we discovered evidence of alien life, would we even realize it? Life on other planets could be so different from what we’re used to that we might not recognize any biological signatures that it produces.

An asteroid did do the deed, study suggests, then volcanism shaped life in its aftermath.

Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, according to an international, Yale-led team of researchers. It was all about the asteroid.

Marine die-offs after the impact may have created opportunities for the life that survived around the globe, new data reveal.

About 790,000 years ago, a meteor slammed into Earth with such force that the explosion blanketed about 10% of the planet with shiny black lumps of rocky debris.

Scientists recently identified the oldest material on Earth: stardust that’s 7 billion years old, tucked away in a massive, rocky meteorite that struck our planet half a century ago.

It was once thought that the gas giant Jupiter protected Earth from asteroids and other deadly space objects. But one scientist has warned that the massive planet actually acts as a ‘sniper rather than a shield’.

Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial College London, recently said that alien lifeforms that are impossible to spot may be living among us. How could that be possible?

How do you support people forever attached to a landscape after an inferno tears through their homelands: decimating native food sources, burning through ancient scarred trees and destroying ancestral ecosystems.

Mysterious seismic hums detected around the world were likely caused by an unusual geologic event — the rumblings of a magma-filled reservoir deep under the Indian Ocean, a new study finds.

New evidence gleaned from Antarctic seashells confirms that Earth was already unstable before the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The full moon of January, called the Wolf Moon, will occur on Jan. 10 at 2:21 p.m. EST (1921 GMT), and it will coincide with a lunar eclipse for skywatchers in much of the world.

New research suggests the ocean current that delivers warm water to Europe has a one-in-six chance of halting temporarily over the next hundred years, potentially resulting in freezing temperatures.

The catastrophic bushfires raging across much of Australia have not only taken a huge human and economic toll, but also delivered heavy blows to biodiversity and ecosystem function.

The fact that Earth’s oceans had to stay liquid for billions of years in order for life to survive—the planet’s temperature had to be not too hot and not too cold but just right— scientists christened it the first “Goldilocks planet.”

New 96-million-year old turtles from Texas connect North America with Asia and the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting vast intercontinental migrations during this time.