Earth news stories

Scientists have proved one of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution – survival of the fittest – for the first time. A researcher at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, found that mammal subspecies play a more important role in evolution than previously thought.

For decades, pits of waste crude oil have dotted the Amazon rainforest in northern Ecuador. Now people are using resilient plants, fungi and bacteria to try to clean them up.

Britain’s original forager on his eight decades of adventures in wild food and why mushrooms were once associated with witchcraft.

At the bottom of the Indian Ocean, in one of the deepest layers of Earth’s crust ever explored, researchers are finding life. An analysis of rock samples from Atlantis Bank, part of a seafloor mountain where deep crustal rock is exposed close to the surface, has revealed microbes adapted to life within nutrient-poor, hairline fractures in the earth.

New research lends credence to an unorthodox retelling of the story of early Earth that was first proposed by a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late Cretaceous.

On 26 December 1980, several United States Air Force (USAF) security personnel stationed at RAF Woodbridge, reported that they investigated “lights” in the surrounding forest.

Before the Taqba Dam impounded the Euphrates River in northern Syria in the 1970s, an archaeological site named Abu Hureyra bore witness to the moment ancient nomadic people first settled down and started cultivating crops.

A new study may help answer one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: Why is there more matter than antimatter? That answer, in turn, could explain why everything from atoms to black holes exists.

What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all.

The debate has raged in the world of paleo-climate research for years: When did the land bridge that once connected Asia and North America flood?

In the dense Amazonian rainforests that sprawl across the Brazilian-Venezuelan border, one of South America’s largest indigenous tribes fears for their future.

Scientists have discovered the fossils of what may be the oldest green algae ever known. The newfound seaweed — called Proterocladus antiquus — lived about a billion years ago

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is advancing at worrying levels. In January, the area lost was double that in the same month in 2019, according to official figures.

University of Tsukuba researchers have linked elements that are enriched in the Cretaceous–Paleogene (KPg) boundary clays from Stevns Klint, Denmark, to the impact of the asteroid that produced the Chicxulub crater at the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.

The hidden undersea continent of Zealandia underwent an upheaval at the time of the birth of the Pacific Ring of Fire.