‘Earthrise,’ a photo of the Earth taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, Dec. 4, 1968.
NASA/Bill Anders via Wikipedia
The Earth isn’t permanent, but it was here for four billion years before humans arrived and should be here for several billion more.
Shutterstock
The 2.29 billion-year-old crater in Western Australia offers clues about what massive space rock impacts meant for the early Earth.
An artist’s conception of the Artemis spacecraft orbiting the moon.
(NASA)
Canadian Jeremy Hansen will be one of the next astronauts on the Artemis II mission. This announcement signals a new era in Canada’s role in space exploration.
A 2kg gold nugget found near Ballarat in 2019.
Minelab Electronics / AAP
A ‘second gold rush’ has seen amateur and professional miners return to Victoria with modern technology.
Warrumbungle national park.
colinslack/Shutterstock
As continents grind across ‘hotspots’ in Earth’s mantle, we can get volcanoes erupting on the surface. Studying these can reveal much about our planet’s evolution.
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Zircons formed in the hellish Chernobyl meltdown are changing how geologists understand their favourite crystals.
Kimberlite volcanic rock with mantle crystals (green olivine and purple and orange garnet) and fragments of country rock (light grey).
Diamonds form alongside a distinct purple companion. We studied it to reach a conclusion about how rare they might actually be.
Sander Lenaerts/Unsplash
To us, Earth’s landscapes might change very little. But over millions of years, our planet’s surface has shifted in innumerable ways.
Rost9/Shutterstock
Earth doesn’t just have an inner core. It also has an innermost inner core, a solid ball within the solid ball in the very middle of the planet.
The building blocks of the Giza pyramids contain trillions of fossilised remains of an ocean-dwelling organism called foraminifera.
Sui Xiankai/Xinhua via Getty Images
Fossils aren’t just pieces of the past that allow scientists to look backwards. They can play a role in modern policy decision-making, too.
Lloyd Homer / GNS Science
We may never know exactly when the next big quake will hit – but we can have a pretty good idea of the odds.
Image of Gosses Bluff taken from the ISS.
NASA
Meteor impacts are an inevitable part of being a rocky planet in space. The craters they leave behind are a window into the tumultuous history of Earth.
The giant bird Genyornis went extinct in Australia around 50,000 years ago.
Peter Trusler
A puzzle over the identity of an extinct bird that laid eggs across Australia has been solved.
The slice you see cut out of the Earth reveals its core, depicted here in bright yellow.
fhm/E+ via Getty Images
Starting at the surface, you would have to dig nearly 2,000 miles before reaching the Earth’s core. No one could survive that trip – and the 10,000-degree F heat once there would vaporize you anyway.
Human remains dating back more than 30,000 years were found at Paviland cave in Gower.
Left: Leighton Collins/Shutterstock; right: Ethan Doyle White CC BY-SA 3.0.
It’s been 200 years since the discovery of one of the oldest human burial sites in western Europe on the Gower peninsula in south Wales.
Google Maps
Earthquakes originating underneath the ocean are often accompanied by tsunami warnings. Here’s what determines the tsunami risk.
Engineers have tried to corral a mud volcano in Indonesia that has covered more than 1,700 acres with mud.
Eka Dharma/AFP via Getty Images
When mud, fluids and gases erupt at the Earth’s surface, they hint at what’s happening underground, allowing scientists to build a more comprehensive 3D view of what’s going on inside our planet.
Transantarctic Mountains peaks are some of the only parts of the continent not buried beneath ice.
Matt Makes Photos / shutterstock
Scientists used satellites to map tens of thousands of glacial landforms in Antarctica’s highest mountains.
An artist’s impression of the Earth around 2.7 billion years ago in the Archean Eon. With green iron-rich seas, an orange methane-rich atmosphere and a surface dominated by oceans, the Archean Earth would have been a very different place.
(Illustration by Andrey Atuchin)
Could tectonic processes in the early Earth have contributed to the rise of oxygen?
Deep ‘blue holes,’ like this one off Belize, can collect evidence of hurricanes.
The TerraMar Project
A look back at hurricane history suggests we may be significantly underestimating future risks.