Category: Earth

An asteroid struck Mars 11 million years ago and sent pieces of the planet hurtling through space; one of these chunks eventually crashed into the Earth. During early investigations of this object, named Lafayette meteorite, scientists discovered…

Off the coast of the Solomon Islands lurks a centuries-old being that is so immense, it can be seen from space.

Discovered in October by the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas team, it is the world’s largest standalone…

It’s one of the most massive migrations on Earth: a huge biomass of tiny plankton that travel from deep in the sea toward the surface. Yet not all of those organisms have limbs to propel themselves upward. So how some of them manage…

As dust from the Sahara blows thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean, it becomes progressively more nutritious for marine microbes, a new study suggests.

Chemical reactions in the atmosphere chew on iron minerals in the…

Researchers from the University of Tokyo and elsewhere have found pockets of living microbes in mineral-filled veins within 2-billion-year-old rock from the Bushveld Igneous Complex, South Africa.

During the Mesozoic era, between 250 and 120 million years ago, an ancient seafloor sank deep into Earth in the East Pacific Rise, a tectonic plate boundary on the floor of the southeastern Pacific Ocean, says a team of geoscientists from the…

They were said to come from outer space, and there were even claims that they were actually bacteria and that they undermined the very definition of viruses. Giant viruses, nicknamed “giruses,” contain enormous quantities of genetic material…

One of the widest hurricanes on record slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast on September 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm, inundating Florida’s coast with meters-high storm surge and sending tropical storm–force winds as far as…

Geologists from Virginia Commonwealth University and elsewhere have found new evidence of bolide impact signatures within specimens from the Massive Australian Precambrian-Cambrian Impact Structure in the Northern Territory, Australia.

The ocean’s circulatory system may not be doing as poorly as previously thought.

A vital ocean artery known as the Florida Current, a bellwether for the ocean’s ability to regulate Earth’s climate, has seemingly been weakening…