New “unprecedented” animations of the Earth show how the planet’s surface has shifted and changed over the past 100 million years. These animations are the most detailed view of the history of Earth’s topography ever, depicting the rise of mountains, the development of basins, and the transport of large masses of sediments around the globe … Read more
Astronomers studying a remote baby star have found a “missing link” that could finally explain the origins of water on Earth, a new study suggests. By training a powerful radio telescope at V883 Orionis, a protostar 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion, astronomers have spotted gaseous water with a chemical composition close … Read more
The moon exerts a previously unknown tidal force on the “plasma ocean” surrounding Earth’s upper atmosphere, creating fluctuations that are similar to the tides in the oceans, a new study suggests. In the study, published Jan. 26 in the journal Nature Physics, scientists used more than 40 years of data collected by satellites to track … Read more
An ancient meteorite that crash-landed on a U.K. driveway may have solved the mystery of where Earth’s water came from. The 4.6 billion-year-old space rock, which landed in front of a family home in the English town of Winchcombe in February 2021, contains water that closely resembles the chemical composition of water found on Earth … Read more
A series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels across Earth’s history could have come from a series of unknown, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cosmic events, a new study has revealed. Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or … Read more
In 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington saw a blast of white light on the surface of the sun. This was the Carrington Event, as scientists now call it, and it is the largest recorded solar storm ever recorded. It was linked with extraordinary auroras — the Northern and Southern Lights — that were visible in … Read more
In Liu Cixin’s short story “The Wandering Earth (opens in new tab)” (first published in Chinese magazine Science Fiction World in July 2000), Cixin portrays a scenario in which the planet’s leaders agree to propel Earth out of the solar system to escape an imminent solar flare that is expected to decimate all of the … Read more
All life on Earth owes its existence to the sun’s radiant heat. But what happens when that radiation surges out of control, and billions of tons of charged solar material suddenly barrel our way at thousands of miles a second? What happens when Earth takes a direct hit from a solar flare — and could … Read more
The sun moves in such a predictable way across the sky that you might never suspect that its relationship with Earth is changing all the time. In fact, the average distance between Earth and the sun is not static year over year. So do we know if Earth is getting closer to or farther from … Read more
There are nearly 8 billion people (opens in new tab) living on Earth today, but our planet wasn’t always so crowded. Around 300,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens likely first appeared, our total population was small, between 100 and 10,000 people. There were so few people at the start, that it took approximately 35,000 years … Read more
