Earth news stories

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.

The clues have survived some 4.5 billion years, so it’s an astonishing find. The international team of researchers behind the discovery compares it to picking out a single grain in a bucket of sand. The research has been published in Nature Geosciences.

The authors add, “Our study shows how, 400,000 years ago in the area of Rome, human groups were able to exploit an extraordinary resource like the elephant—not only for food, but also by transforming its bones into tools. The study was published on October 8, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One. 

Melting ice sheets in North America played a far greater role in driving global sea-level rise at the end of the last ice age than scientists had thought, according to a Tulane University-led study published in Nature Geoscience.

A German-Austrian team led by Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Leibniz-HKI has been able to biochemically demonstrate for the first time that different types of mushrooms produce the same mind-altering active substance, psilocybin, in different ways. The results are published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new research proposes a transformative approach to economics—one that recognizes nature not merely as a resource, but as a living system deeply intertwined with human identity, culture, and well-being.

A cloud of dust escapes from an excavation site in the sand of Chad’s arid north, where scientists are looking for signs of human habitation in an area once humid and called the “Green Sahara.”