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Articles on Earth

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On June 5-6, 2012, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory collected images of one of the rarest predictable solar events: the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. NASA/SDO, AIA

Why we need to get back to Venus

This hot, acidic neighbor with its surface veiled in thick clouds hasn’t benefited from the attention showered on Mars and the Moon. But Venus may offer insights into the fate of the Earth.
Earth is really ancient, and humans have only been around for a tiny part of that time. NASA

Curious Kids: how was the Earth made?

All the buildings and the cars and the restaurants, and the phones and even everything that’s inside of you… it all started with an exploding star, billions of years ago.
Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago. Dietmar Muller

How Earth’s continents became twisted and contorted over millions of years

Giant forces slowly move continents across a viscous layer of the Earth, like biscuits gliding over a warm toffee ocean. This stresses the continents, and twists and contorts the crust.
Mountains keep growing and growing and growing for many millions of years until they are so heavy that they can no longer grow taller, only wider. Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash

Curious Kids: how do mountains form?

When I was little, geologists worked out Earth’s surface was made of pieces, like a giant puzzle. Those pieces, called “tectonic plates”, move and bump into each other and mountains form.
The United Nations says people “left behind” include those vulnerable to the effects of climate change, but aren’t the furthest behind those damaging the environment? Here, a man rides a bicycle through a devastated Homs, Syria. Numerous studies say climate change was a factor in record-setting drought, one of several causes of the country’s civil war. AP Photo/Dusan Vranic

‘Leaving no one behind’ conveys a paternalistic approach to development

The United Nations Declaration on sustainable development stresses “leaving no-one behind,” but what about the factors that cause many to be behind in the first place?

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