I asked my friend Julie Ménard how Earth formed. She’s a planetary scientist at Washington State University. She told me it started with the Big Bang. That was nearly 14 billion years ago. “The Big ...

Astronomers are uncovering the earliest stages of planet formation with the help of technologies like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Recent findings from the Butterfly Nebula, 3,400 ...

Even when Earth was locked in its most extreme deep freeze, the planet’s climate may not have been as silent and still as ...

Tiny zircon crystals are revealing that Earth’s earliest history may have included surprisingly complex tectonic activity.

Some 4.6 billion years ago, Earth was nothing like the gentle blue planet we know today. Frequent and violent celestial impacts churned its surface and interior into a seething ocean of magma—an ...

Ryugu’s samples reveal that water activity on asteroids lasted far longer than scientists thought, possibly reshaping theories of how Earth gained its oceans. A billion-year-old impact may have melted ...

Even when Earth was locked in a global deep freeze, its climate may have kept moving. Ancient rocks reveal seasonal and decade scale cycles beneath the ice during Snowball Earth.

Earth has a long and dramatic history, and one recurring theme is extinction. Did you know that over the last 500 million years, our planet experienced five major mass extinction events? These events ...