Rain falls lightly on the ocean's surface. Marine mammals chirp and squeal as they swim along. The pounding of surf along a distant shoreline heaves and thumps with metronomic regularity. These are the sounds that most of us associate...
The construction of a major railway through Kenya will have long-term environmental impacts on the area, suggesting more work needs to be done to limit the damage on future infrastructure projects, a major study reveals.
The biggest impact of the...
The Arctic Ocean was covered by up to 900 m thick shelf ice and was filled entirely with freshwater at least twice in the last 150,000 years. This surprising finding, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, is...
Geoscientists have released a video that for the first time shows the uninterrupted movement of the Earth's tectonic plates over the past billion years.
The international effort provides a scientific framework for understanding planetary habitability and for finding critical metal resources needed...
Every late winter and early spring, huge dust storms swirled across the bare and frozen landscapes of Europe during the coldest periods of the latest ice age. These paleo-tempests, which are seldom matched in our modern climate frequently covered...
The temperature of a planet is linked with the diversity of life that it can support. MIT geologists have now reconstructed a timeline of the Earth's temperature during the early Paleozoic era, between 510 and 440 million years ago—a...
Large parts of today's Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago. Prehistoric engravings of giraffes and crocodiles testify to this, as does a stone-age cave painting in the desert that even shows swimming humans. However, these illustrations only...
Researchers from EPFL and ETH Zurich have conducted an original scientific study that puts forth a plausible explanation for the mysterious 1959 death of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in the former Soviet Union. The tragic Dyatlov Pass...
Scientists have resolved a key climate change mystery, showing that the annual global temperature today is the warmest of the past 10,000 years—contrary to recent research, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Nature.
The long-standing mystery is called the...
An upsurge of matter from deep beneath the Earth's crust could be pushing the continents of North and South America further apart from Europe and Africa, new research has found.
The plates attached to the Americas are moving apart from...
Scientists have identified a key nutrient source used by algae living on melting ice surfaces linked to rising sea levels. The Greenland ice sheet -- the second largest ice body in the world after the Antarctic ice sheet --...
