Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than ...

If Earth's history were a calendar year, humans would not appear until the last few minutes before midnight on Dec. 31.

Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in ...

In his seminal work of popular geology called Basin and Range, John McPhee first pinned the concept of deep time down on ...

Geologic mapping has been one of the most fundamental mandates of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since its establishment ...

From time to time, when Earth's tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new ...

Cemeteries not only provide a peaceful place to contemplate and commemorate the dead. They are also great places for studying ...

Earth's crust, or the outermost shell of the planet, has drastically changed throughout geologic history, mostly due to the ...

A new video shows how Earth's magnetic field weakened and warped before temporarily flipping during a recent "polar reversal event." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

One of the best known examples of that latter phenomenon is the Cambrian Explosion—the geologic period some 530 million years ...

Cratons are believed to be the longest-lived regions of the Earth, but a new study shows how dynamic processes can cause their eventual disintegration.

An unexpected find in tiny crystals hints that the Earth's mantle may not quite behave as has been believed for nearly a century.