Earth news stories

Analysis of ocean sediments has surfaced geochemical clues in line with the possibility that an encounter with a disintegrating comet 12,800 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere triggered rapid cooling of Earth’s air and ocean. Christopher Moore of the University of South Carolina, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the journal PLOS One on August 6, 2025.

Ötzi the Iceman may have come to an unfortunate end while crossing the Alps more than 5,000 years ago, but thanks to his well-preserved remains, he’s still helping us understand our past. A new digital reconstruction of the mummy’s ribcage is providing fresh insights into modern human evolution.

The ancient meteor impact that formed Arizona’s Barringer Crater sent shock waves through the Grand Canyon — likely triggering a landslide that dammed the Colorado River, a new study suggests. The study, published on July 15 in the journal Geology, has linked two major events that were thought to be completely unrelated.

The environment minister, Murray Watt, hosted more than a dozen ambassadors from countries on the world heritage committee on Monday as he ramped up lobbying efforts to get the Murujuga rock art complex inscribed on the world heritage list.

A new, advanced technique for studying fossils has revealed that squids evolved more than 50 million years earlier than previously thought and dominated Earth’s ancient seas. The new study was published in the journal Science.

An obscure rock formation on the eastern shore of Canada’s Hudson Bay may contain the oldest known rocks on Earth, a new study claims. Their findings are published June 26 in the journal Science.

Looking around, you could easily assume this cold and barren high country was too difficult for people to spend time in. But our new research, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, indicates Dargan Shelter was occupied as early as the last Ice Age and repeatedly visited during this cold period.

Scientists are turning to something that’s been quietly fixing nature for billions of years: mushrooms.

With its cold climate, short growing season, and dense forests, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known as a challenging place for farming. But a new Dartmouth-led study provides evidence of intensive farming by ancestral Native Americans at the Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River, making it the most complete ancient agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States. The findings are published in Science.

An elusive fungus capable of generating quantities of a compound used to synthesize the hallucinogen LSD has finally been discovered on the morning glory vine after decades of searching. The research is published in Mycologia.

Gold mining is literally sucking the Amazon rainforest dry, creating an environment where trees cannot grow, according to a new study.

A significant fossil puzzle piece in the evolution of the first vertebrate animals to leave Earth’s ancient seas and walked on land was discovered in Scotland more than 40 years ago. But it has only just been accurately aged—and the results have left palaeontologists stunned. The results are  published in the journal PLOS One.

An artificial island of sand dredged from Indonesia’s seafloor has accidentally revealed evidence of a long-lost sunken world, inhabited by early humans. The research was published in four installments in Quaternary Environments and Humans here, here, here, and here.

The Vikings did not navigate by map, compass or sextant. Instead, they used “mental maps” where memories and experiences played a crucial role. They also used myths linked to various coastal landmarks. The findings are published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

Three scientists in the United Kingdom have modeled the impacts of an icy cometary collision with an Earth-like, tidally locked terrestrial planet…They found even relatively small cometary impacts can significantly disrupt the climate of a terrestrial (Earth-like) tidally locked planet, as well as deliver oxygen to the atmosphere and be a source of an exoplanet’s oceans. Their first of two papers on the topic was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“The duration of the Marinoan glaciation (4 to 15 million years) currently has 11 million years of uncertainty”, write the authors of the new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.