Wave-battered and sunlit, ancient coral reefs look like ruins – but they’re anything but silent. Locked inside their stone-white skeletons are timelines of temperature swings, ocean chemistry jolts, and sea-level pulses that outlast empires. The mystery is simple yet profound: how do we reconstruct climates that no instrument ever measured? The answer lives in the ...
Some of the most important clues to how mammals took hold on Earth aren’t in blockbuster skeletons – they’re in thumbnail-sized teeth tucked away in Arctic collections. In field camps perched above icy rivers and in museum drawers that sat untouched for decades, researchers are finding a different kind of headline fossil: tiny, stubborn, and ...
New research reveals that rapid, sulfur-heavy volcanic eruptions plunged Earth into deadly cold snaps, wiping out competitors and giving insulated dinosaurs an unexpected edge. For decades, scientists believed that rising carbon dioxide levels from ancient supervolcanoes slowly cooked the planet, triggering the end-Triassic extinction 201 million years ago. But a groundbreaking study published in Proceedings ...
A stretch of streaked grey rock in a remote, windy part of northern Quebec has sparked one of geology’s most heated debates. The Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt (NGB) is a rough outcrop on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. It may have the oldest intact rocks on Earth, dating back an incredible 4.16 billion years14. If ...
