700 million years ago, Earth was a giant snowball cloaked in ice from pole to pole – a global deep freeze that held the planet in a stranglehold, threatening the survival of the earliest complex life.

New research suggests that a discrepancy in rocks shows they endured extreme heat, and reveals more about an ancient part of our planet’s history Riley Black | Science Correspondent A thin slice of ...

A new analysis of rocks thought to be at least 2.5 billion years old helps clarify the chemical history of Earth's mantle -- the geologic layer beneath the planet's crust. The findings hone scientists ...

Earth's Ediacaran Period, roughly 630 to 540 million years ago, has always been something of a magnetic minefield for scientists. During earlier and later time periods, tectonic plates kept a steady ...

A thin slice of the ancient rocks collected from Gakkel Ridge near the North Pole, photographed under a microscope and seen under cross-polarized light. Field width ~ 14mm. Credit: E. Cottrell, ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our ...

Life made the modern Earth as much as the Earth made life, a new book by a philosopher of consciousness argues. That dynamic leaves humans with a unique set of moral questions, Peter Godfrey-Smith of ...