Earth news stories

Scientists believe they have found evidence of microbes that were thriving near hydrothermal vents on Earth’s surface just 300m years after the planet formed – the strongest evidence yet that life began far earlier than is widely assumed.

On a remote peninsula in Western Australia, a 16-hour drive from the nearest city, 30,000-year-old faces stare at the rare visitor to this wild location.

Image from: Marius Fenger (Wiki Commons)

Five planets, visible to the naked eye, are poised to line up and march across the sky this summer in an unusual alignment that will be graced by the light of the moon.

No matter where you’re standing on Earth, you can only ever see one face of the Moon. Its other cheek is perennially turned away from our planet, and this far side is much more pockmarked with craters than the one facing us.

A tsunami 3800 years ago devastated the coastline of Chile and encouraged hunter-gatherers to move inland, where they stayed for the next 1000 years.

Buried in forest litter or sprouting from trees, fungi might give the impression of being silent and relatively self-contained organisms, but a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators

A stunning array of new fungi has been described for the first time on the Polynesian Island.

Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium gas, is leaking out of Earth’s core, a new study reports. Because almost all helium-3 is from the Big Bang, the gas leak adds evidence that Earth formed inside a solar nebula, which has long been debated.

“They’ve lived for so long; just think what they’ve seen.” Forester Nick Baimbridge is gazing fondly at a majestic oak that has stood for more than a thousand years. On this wintry afternoon, birds sing from lichen-covered branches and a deer runs through the undergrowth.

Overnight on March 24-25, 2022, another small asteroid raced toward Earth, unseen until hours before its closest approach.

According to calculations made a few years ago by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson, this literal mass of visual imagery – along with half a billion tweets, countless texts, billions of WhatsApp messages, and every other bit and byte of information we’ve created – could be making our planet a touch heavier.

When the dinosaur-destroying asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, massive amounts of sulfur — volumes more than were previously thought — were thrown high above land into the stratosphere, a new study finds.

As the full Moon rises, so too does the Northern black swift (Cypseloides niger borealis). When this little bird migrates from the Rocky Mountains to the Amazon rainforest, researchers have found it uses moonlight to regain its energy.

While the Conservative party’s proposed dash for wind power is good news for the climate it could be bad news for archaeology, with rapid offshore windfarm development sealing off access to some of the best-preserved and most complete evidence of early human communities in the world.

A wild new theory suggests there may be another “anti-universe,” running backward in time prior to the Big Bang.