Bubbles of greenhouse gases trapped in ice shed new light on an important climate transition that occurred about a million years ago.
early Earth
Posted inEditors' Vox
How Chemical Processes Influence Fracture Pattern Development
Many tools of chemical analysis, experimentation, modeling, and theory have the potential to increase our understanding of how fracture patterns develop at different geological time scales.
Posted inNews
Did Bacterial Enzymes Cap the Oxygen in Early Earth’s Atmosphere?
A new theory suggests that nitrogenase from cyanobacteria could be the reason oxygen levels remained low after the Great Oxidation Event.
Posted inNews
Moon Sheds Light on Early Solar Spin
Lunar samples reveal that the Sun spun relatively slowly in its first billion years and blasted the Earth and Moon with coronal mass ejections.
Posted inNews
Newly Discovered Fossil Species Named After Star Wars Starship
The 500-million-year-old species is a distant relative of today’s crabs, spiders, and insects.
Posted inNews
When Water Met Rock
Geologists discover rocks bearing the earliest known evidence of water interacting with rock on Earth’s surface.
Posted inNews
Earth’s Eccentric Orbit Helped Preserve Rare Soft-Tissue Fossils
Cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit helped to preserve rare fossils in Morocco.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Southern Hemisphere Sediments Show Surprising Pliocene Cyclicity
New, high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions with 100,000-year rhythms may offer insights into how Earth’s climate system operated during a time when the planet was warmer than it is today.
Posted inNews
Scientists Discover Pristine Collection of Soft-Tissue Fossils
The fossils include jellyfish, box jellies, branched algae, and sponges, which are underrepresented in or missing from other deposits.
Posted inFeatures
Isotope Geochemists Glimpse Earth’s Impenetrable Interior
Painstaking measurements of isotopes and their relative abundance in rocks have illuminated the hidden inner Earth and our planet’s origins and shadowy past for much of the preceding century.