Earth news stories

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.”

Silverpit crater off Yorkshire coast was caused by cathedral-sized asteroid that set off 100-metre tsunami 43m years ago. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

Glass strewn across southern Australia has been revealed to be the remnants of a previously unknown asteroid impact which happened about 11 million years ago (mya)…The specimens analysed in the new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters are ‘tektites’…

The findings, published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, unveil a previously undocumented Paleolithic presence in Ayvalık and more importantly could redocument our species’ migration into the continent.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, describes a powerful new mechanism for increasing the extent of effective area-based protection by piggybacking on community management of natural resources. The paper is titled “Community-based management expands ecosystem protection footprint in Amazonian forests.”

From butterflies to grasshoppers, many delicate little things that run our world are in dire trouble. Not just in regions where human activity directly affects the landscape, but even in remote, human-free zones, a new study finds. The remote insect study was published in Ecology.

Reporting in PLOS One, UC Santa Barbara Emeritus Professor of Earth Science James Kennett and collaborators present their findings of shocked quartz—grains of sand deformed by extreme pressures and temperatures—at three classic Clovis culture archaeological sites in the United States: Murray Springs in Arizona, Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Arlington Canyon in California’s Channel Islands.

Columbian mammoths in Mexico are genetically different from those in the U.S. and Canada, surprise DNA study reveals. The research was published Aug. 28 in the journal Science.

This discovery, published in the journal PLOS One, offers new insights into the complexity of early Homo sapiens’ interaction with plant resources—not only as food but also for more sophisticated uses such as dyeing and medicine. Indeed, Isatis tinctoria L., has a long history of use in both dyeing and healing.

Even the words we use to express our connection to nature are dwindling as the demands of modern life isolate us from the non-human world, according to a new study by psychologist Miles Richardson of the University of Derby in the UK. The research was published in Earth.

The research takes a new look at a species known as Denisovans. These ancient relatives of humans lived from what is today Russia south to Oceania and west to the Tibetan Plateau.The researchers published their results in the journal Science.