Earth news stories

Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, African scientists are championing the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna

A landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe had temperate forests that could have sustained Stone Age people for millennia before the landmass was flooded, a new study suggests. The results were published on March 10 in the journal PNAS.

In his new book, “The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life” (Hachette Book Group, 2025), Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, explores these complex interdependencies found across the natural world, including the numerous mutualisms humans engage in, such as our relationships with dogs and with the microbes in our guts.

The last common ancestor of all living things did not just suddenly appear on Earth roughly 4.2 billion years ago. Some of its genes came from an even older and more mysterious source…The study was published in Cell Genomics.

Recreating cosmic dust may help answer questions about how meteorites hitting Earth came to contain organic matter

There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4 per cent), but non-negligible… A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released as a preprint on arXiv, looks at the bright side of the potential science we could do if a collision does indeed happen.

This intriguing astronaut photo shows an oasis town and crop circles lurking within the shadowy tail of a “camel-hump” mountain in the harsh Saudi Arabian desert. The unlikely settlement lies within an ancient lake bed and is home to rock art dating back thousands of years.

Ever since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites have proven impossible to categorize. This research was published in Science.

The research examined the pivotal period between 18,000 and 7,500 years ago, spanning the end of the last Ice Age and the transition to the warmth of the modern Holocene era. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New genetic research shows that DNA and archaeological evidence align with the “long chronology” of the peopling of Australia. The new study was published Friday (Nov. 28) in the journal Science Advances.

According to a new machine-learning analysis, fragmentary carbon traces from the Josefsdal Chert, dating back 3.33 billion years, are the earliest and most confident detection of biotic chemistry on Earth to date. The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The crater formed during the Holocene epoch when the last ice age ended roughly 11,700 years ago…The evidence confirming its extraterrestrial origin lies in the details. Within the granite, researchers found numerous quartz fragments exhibiting planar deformation features and microscopic characteristics that serve as geological fingerprints of impact events.

Archaeologists in Peru have found new evidence showing how the oldest known civilization in the Americas adapted and survived a climate catastrophe without resorting to violence.

These newly named ananguites, the researchers say, formed in a giant impact that took place some 11 million years ago. The findings have been published in Earth & Planetary Science Letters.

As British Columbia faces increasingly severe wildfire seasons, new research at UBC is revealing the hidden helpers at work underneath the ash.

Scientists are using DNA from sediments to learn more about Earth’s past, including new revelations about the woolly mammoth.