Earth news stories

“What second moon,” you ask? Astronomers call it 2020 SO – a small object that dropped into Earth’s orbit about halfway between our planet and the moon in September 2020.

Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming.

One of the lingering mysteries of the universe is why anything exists at all.

The Sun has a lot of rhythm and goes through different cycles of activity. The most well-known cycle might be the Schwabe cycle, which has an 11-year cadence. But what about cycles with much longer time scales? How can scientists understand them?

Indigenous leaders and environmentalists are urging Joe Biden to shutdown some of America’s most controversial fossil fuel pipelines, after welcoming his executive order cancelling the Keystone XL (KXL) project.

Likely the most well-known result of the Earth’s magnetic field are the Aurora Borealis and Australis (Northern and Southern Lights).

Ancient fragments of Earth’s crust acted as ‘seeds’ for new crust to grow from.

The Anthropocene marks relentless and increasingly grave environmental degradation as the Earth faces tipping points for climate change, biodiversity and survival. To address these ills, scientists say we can learn valuable lessons from the past.

An aerial photographer has compiled a series of images of skeletal-like ‘trees’ cutting their way through mudflats and lake beds in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Critics condemn ‘callous betrayal’ after Trump officials set in motion transfer of Oak Flat to Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

Remarkably well-preserved fossils are helping scientists unravel a mystery about the origins of early animals that puzzled Charles Darwin.

Having survived the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago, crocodiles are one of the most resilient animals on Earth.

Isolated in the heart of the Amazon, Dario Kopenawa Yanomami’s father is working with shamans and the spirits of the forest to weaken the xawara, the word Brazil’s indigenous Yanomami community uses for epidemics brought in by outsiders.

Image from: NASA  (Wiki Commons)

Many botanists dispute idea of plant sentience, but study of climbing beans sows seed of doubt.

One of the most remarkable “sixth” senses in the animal kingdom is magnetoreception – the ability to detect magnetic fields – but exactly how it works remains a mystery.

Image from: BanduG (Wiki Commons)

How life originated on Earth continues to fascinate scientists, but it’s not easy peering back billions of years into the past. Now, evidence is growing for a relatively new hypothesis of how life began: with a very precise mix of RNA and DNA.