Of the heavy metals spewed by dying stars, the astronomers were particularly interested in iron-60. That’s because iron-60 is ...

A distant star’s explosion 2.5 million years ago may have blasted Earth with cosmic rays, mutating DNA and triggering a virus explosion in Lake Tanganyika. Scientists traced radioactive iron-60 ...

Our planet’s first known mass extinction happened about 440 million years ago. Species diversity on Earth had been increasing over a period of roughly 30 million years, but that would come to a halt ...

had been used as evidence to support the theory that plate tectonics started nearly as soon as Earth had solid ground — roughly 4 billion years ago. "That's probably a flawed argument now ...

A little over 5 million years ago, water from the Atlantic Ocean found a way through ... the so-called Zanclean megaflood would be the largest single flood recorded on Earth. But extraordinary claims ...

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from any continent, Easter Island rises out of the sea. Its surface ...

But while lifeless during that time, the planet was already covered by vast oceans dotted with hydrothermal vent systems that ...

The study also provides a new approach to solving one of the biggest enduring scientific mysteries: when did plate tectonics begin?

Precambrian time covers the vast bulk of the Earth's history, starting with the planet's creation about 4.5 billion years ... around two billion years ago. About 800 million years ago, oxygen ...

A crater at the edge of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico was created by a massive asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago At the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago, an ...