Geology

The first emergence and persistence of continental crust on Earth during the Archaean (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago) has important implications for plate tectonics, ocean chemistry, and biological evolution, and it happened about half a billion years earlier than previously thought, according to new research being presented at the EGU General Assembly 2021.

Nearly three-quarters of Earth's land had been transformed by humans by 10,000 BC, but new research shows it largely wasn't at the expense of the natural world.

Lightning strikes were just as important as meteorites in creating the perfect conditions for life to emerge on Earth, geologists say.

Across the history of our planet, around 190 terrestrial impact craters have been identified that still survive the Earth’s geological processes, with the most recent event occurring in 1947 at the Sikhote-Alin Mountains of south-eastern Russia.

A research team including the geobiologist Dr. Helge Missbach from the University of Cologne has detected organic molecules and gases trapped in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks.

Drilling a 270,000-year old core from a Tasmanian lake has provided the first Australian record of a major global event where the Earth's magnetic field 'switched '- and the opportunity to establish a precedent for developing new paleomagnetic dating tools for Australian archaeology and paleosciences.

How did rocks rust on Earth and turn red? A Rutgers-led study has shed new light on the important phenomenon and will help address questions about the Late Triassic climate more than 200 million years ago, when greenhouse gas levels were high enough to be a model for what our planet may be like in the future.

The temperature of a planet is linked with the diversity of life that it can support. MIT geologists have now reconstructed a timeline of the Earth's temperature during the early Paleozoic era, between 510 and 440 million years ago -- a pivotal period when animals became abundant in a previously microbe-dominated world.

Large parts of today's Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago. Prehistoric engravings of giraffes and crocodiles testify to this, as does a stone-age cave painting in the desert that even shows swimming humans.

Once upon a time, seasons in Gale Crater probably felt something like those in Iceland. But nobody was there to bundle up more than 3 billion years ago.

Around AD 1085 AD, along the southern rim of Northern Arizona's elevated Colorado Plateau a volcano erupted, forever changing ancient Puebloan fortunes and all nearby life.

Around 120 million years ago, the earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from its oceans.