The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) prehistoric creature.
Dozens of the 395-million-year-old fossil footprints were recently discovered on a former marine tidal flat or lagoon in southeastern Poland.
A newly detected 19th-century volcanic eruption may solve the mystery of a strangely cool decade in the early 1800s, researchers say—but the location of the volcano itself remains a puzzle.
Scientists have long blamed the 1815 eruption of an Indonesian volcano, Tambora, for a worldwide cold snap the following year—the so-called year without a summer.
Earth hums, and it’s the west coasts of Europe and parts of the Americas that are the main sources of the sound, a new study says.
Since 1998 researchers have known that Earth emits a low-frequency hum inaudible to humans. The sound waves register on instruments used to detect earthquakes even when no quakes are occurring.
Two South American glaciers are displaying strange behavior for the times: They’re growing.
Most of the 50 massive glaciers draped over the spine of the Patagonian Andes are shrinking in response to a global warming, said Andrés Rivera, a glaciologist at the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile.
Demand for the mercury compound vermilion was strong enough to support a large-scale mercury mining industry in the Andes as far back as 1400 B.C., according to a new study.
A bright red pigment, vermilion was used in ancient Andean rituals and is frequently found adorning gold and silver ceremonial objects in ancient burials of kings and nobles in South America.
Earthquakes are notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to predict. “You are dealing with a very complex physical system that behaves very differently in many places,” says David Schwartz, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Hazards Project. Nevertheless, researchers are trying to improve earthquake probability forecasts and working toward, maybe one day, prediction and prevention. Learn about eight of their ideas.
An expanse of bedrock along Hudson Bay, Canada, may be a chunk of crust that formed not long after the solar system was born nearly five billion years ago, according to a new study.