Earth news stories

Birdwatchers get very excited when a ‘rare’ migratory bird makes landfall having been blown off-course and flown beyond its normal range. But these are rare for a reason; most birds that have made the journey before they are able to correct for large displacements and find their final destination.

When you look up at the sky, the region of space around Earth may look as clear as a song, but there’s a heck of a lot going on out there that we can’t see.

The oldest evidence of land fungus may be a wee microfossil that’s 635 million years old, found in a cave in southern China.

Deep – really deep – in the Antarctic ice, scientists have found jarosite, a tawny-hued mineral that’s rarely found on Earth, but seems to be curiously abundant on the red planet.

When Harvard professor Avi Loeb discovered possible signs of extraterrestrial activity, it caused a scandal in the research community. Is fear and conservatism stopping science from considering plausible evidence that there are aliens out there?

“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.