In a remote desert, scientists have discovered one of Earth’s oldest asteroid impacts. It dates to well over a billion years ago, to a time when our planet was inhabited solely by single-celled life.

Earth has gone through many geologic phases, but it did have one striking period of stasis: Our planet experienced a tropical environment where algae and single-celled organisms flourished for almost ...

A research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), along ...

Some 2.3 billion years ago, the Earth would have been unrecognizable to us. At that time, ancient microorganisms were the dominant life form; there were no animals, no plant life, and certainly no ...

Researchers have discovered the world's oldest known meteorite impact crater, which could significantly redefine our understanding of the origins of life and how our planet was shaped. The team found ...

Sea levels rose and fell many times during the ice age, showing ice sheets were larger and more active much earlier than once believed.

What types of animals first existed on Earth long ago? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists ...

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Earth may have had fresh, not just salty, water as soon as 600 million years after the planet formed — a mere blink of an eye in geologic time. Researchers analyzed oxygen molecules within ...

Quasi-moons are not real moons and don't actually orbit the Earth, although they sometimes appear to do so for short periods of time, Phil Nicholson, professor of astronomy at Cornell University, told ...

New research from Japan's iron-rich hot springs shows how early microbes may have harnessed iron and oxygen during the Great Oxygenation Event. Some 2.3 billion years ago, the Earth would have been ...