Our planet plunged into one of the most dramatic climate states in its long history, approximately 720–635 million years ago.

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 ...

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 ...

A new study led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo challenges a long-standing assumption about Earth's most extreme ice ages. Using numerical ...

A persistent "gravity hole" beneath Antarctica gives scientists a window into Earth's deep interior, showing how processes ...

Understanding history helps us make sense of the present and even make predictions for the future. It’s not just historians who study history, but scientists as well. As climate change shifts the ...

New research shows that early land plants started influencing Earth’s climate hundreds of millions of years earlier than ...

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 ...

Earth would certainly be different without its rusty red neighbor. No Mars in the night sky, no target for future human exploration. Now, however, scientists say this scenario would result in much ...

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 ...

NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of ...