Earth news stories

In 1994, tektites and concentric fault lines in southern Virginia revealed an 85-kilometer-wide impact crater under Chesapeake Bay. Science News reported that “a structure this size would rank as the largest crater in the United States” and would be among the largest on Earth

The new species, which has been named Burgessomedusa phasmiformis,resembles a large, swimming jellyfish with a saucer or bell-shaped body up to 20cm high. Its roughly 90 short tentacles would have allowed it to capture sizeable prey.

Experts revealed the 125m-year-old fossil that froze in time after being taken on by a small mammal a third of its size. They are tangled together, the mammal’s teeth sunk into the beaked dinosaur’s ribs, its left paw clasping the beast’s lower jaw. See research here.

They say what goes around comes around, but it’s unlikely the saying was supposed to ever refer to meteorites. And yet here we are. Scientists are seeking to confirm that a black rock discovered in Morocco in 2018 departed Earth’s pull for outer space, only to return to it like a prodigal child.

The volcano beneath Italy erupted 40,000 years ago and had catastrophic impact on Earth’s climate — around the same time that the Neanderthals began their slow march to extinction.

Scientists think they’ve uncovered evidence of the oldest glaciers ever found, in ancient rocks speckled with oxygen isotopes lying beneath the world’s largest gold deposits in South Africa. The study was published in Geochemical Perspectives Letters, with further results presented at the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society’s Goldschmidt Conference.

Most land plants living today have spiral patterns involving the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Because the spirals are so common, scientists have thought the patterns must have evolved in some of the earliest land plants. But the leaves of the ancient plant… were arranged in spirals that can’t be described by Fibonacci numbers, researchers report in the June 16 Science.

Hunter-gatherer roles in human society are not nearly as gendered as anthropologists and archaeologists have traditionally believed, with narratives of ‘man the hunter’ and ‘woman the gatherer’ crumbling in the face of new evidence. The study was published in PLOS ONE.

Researchers studying the sites have determined that the Yanliao Biota date back to between 164 million and 157 million years ago. Their results are published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

From the Mediterranean to North America, there’s a lot of evidence that the day the ‘sun stands still’ has been important to humans for thousands of years.

The weary Indigenous men gathered at their base camp, nestled among towering trees and dense vegetation that formed a disorienting sea of green. They had been searching for four lost Indigenous children believed to have survived a plane crash in the ancestral jungle in southern Colombia for more than a month.

A team led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers has discovered the earliest known evidence that Native Americans living in present-day central Alaska may have begun freshwater fishing around 13,000 years ago during the last ice age. See the study here.

An international team of researchers who discovered a vast network of stone walls along the River Nile in Egypt and Sudan say these massive “river groins” reveal an exceptionally long-lived form of hydraulic engineering in the Nile Valley, and shed light on connections between ancient Nubia and Egypt. See research here.

Octopuses have found an incredible way to protect the more delicate features of their nervous system against radically changing temperatures.

The increased use of light-emitting diodes is obscuring our view of the Milky Way as well as taking a toll on human and wildlife health.