Houchin and his colleagues studied dozens of zircon crystals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia. These are the oldest ...

Continental clues: Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet’s history, challenging current theories about plate tectonics. Researchers have made a new ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. New model suggests an ocean ...

There are many open questions about how our planet formed 4.55 billion years ago: When did plate tectonics start? When did the Earth's mantle begin to vigorously circulate in a process called ...

New research shows that the earliest sponges were soft bodied and lacked skeletons, explaining why their oldest fossils are ...

Around 2.3 billion years ago, the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) marked a major turning point in Earth’s history. The increase ...

Earth should have lost its water long before life ever had a chance to appear. Bathed in a young Sun’s fierce radiation and wrapped in a global magma ocean, the planet’s surface looked more like a ...

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