For more than a quarter billion years, coral reefs did far more than brighten shallow seas. Long before humans appeared, ...

National Research Council (U.S.) Board on Earth Sciences and Resources "The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising mechanism that may explain how Earth cooled dramatically after the age of dinosaurs.

The Cambrian Explosion in which life on Earth underwent massive diversification was likely triggered by eccentricities in Earth’s orbit around our Sun. Or so say the authors of a new paper just ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. An international team of researchers investigated how Earth’s ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

A large-scale climate simulation combined with fossil evidence shows how shifts in temperature and rainfall guided human migration and evolution. Changes driven by Earth’s orbital cycles altered ...

The cycling of water within Earth's interior regulates plate tectonics, volcanism, ocean volume, and climate stability, ...

1. Introduction -- 2. The great cooling -- 3. Ice age cycles -- 4. Trace gases warm the planet -- 5. Moving continents and dating rocks -- 6. Mapping past climates -- 7. Into the icehouse -- 8. The ...

Mars, long admired for its rusty hue and alien deserts, may play a far greater role in shaping life on Earth than once believed. A new study published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society ...