“There’s more than a billion years that’s gone,” said Barra Peak, co-author of a 2021 study on this puzzling gap in Earth’s ...

If pollen allergies are getting to you, you are not alone. Every year, plants release billions of pollen grains into the air, specks of male reproductive material that many of us notice only when we ...

Pollen grains are far more than allergens — they are also nature’s time capsules, preserving clues about Earth’s past environments for millions of years. Pollen’s tough outer shell enables it to ...

Our Earth’s atmosphere was not always the safe haven it is today. New research, informed by ancient ocean fossils, provides a glimpse into a time when our planet’s atmosphere was inhospitable and ...

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.

In a remote desert, scientists have discovered one of Earth’s oldest asteroid impacts. It dates to well over a billion years ago, to a time when our planet was inhabited solely by single-celled life.

A drawing of an orange, cloud-covered planet against a black background During the Archean Eon, 4-2.5 billion years ago, Earth likely looked very different than it does today. Its hazy skies may have ...

Parts of the ancient Earth may have formed continents and recycled crust through subduction far earlier than previously thought. New research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison ...

New scientific theory based on ancient proteins suggests that genes did not arise as we believed and that life could have started elsewhere.

Scientists have long wondered why Earth's overall makeup doesn't fully match the mix of materials found in ancient meteorites. One hypothesis has been that our proto-Earth (what the earliest stages of ...

For most of deep time, spreading ridges released more carbon than volcano chains, changing how we interpret Earth’s climate history.

An electron microscope image, colorized, shows different structures of pollen grains, including sunflower, morning glory and primrose. Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility If pollen allergies are ...