Articles for tag: Earth History, Great Plains geology, hidden craters, meteor impact sites, planetary science

The Hidden Meteor Field Beneath the Great Plains

The Hidden Meteor Field Beneath the Great Plains

Jan Otte

The vast stretches of America’s heartland have always held secrets beneath their seemingly endless prairies and farmland. What many don’t realize is that beneath the rolling wheat fields and corn stalks of lies one of the most remarkable collections of buried meteorite evidence on Earth. These hidden cosmic treasures tell a story that spans millions ...

The U.S. Desert That Was Once an Ancient Ocean

The U.S. Desert That Was Once an Ancient Ocean

Gargi Chakravorty

Imagine walking across the scorching desert floor of Nevada or Utah, surrounded by endless stretches of sand and stark rock formations. The bone-dry landscape seems utterly hostile to marine life, yet beneath your feet lies one of geology’s most remarkable secrets. You’re standing on what was once the bottom of a vast ancient sea, teeming ...

The Ancient Ecosystems Buried Under Modern Cities

The Ancient Ecosystems Buried Under Modern Cities

Gargi Chakravorty

Imagine walking down a bustling city street, unaware that beneath the concrete and asphalt lies a hidden world of ancient life. Every step you take could be directly above prehistoric creatures that roamed the Earth millions of years ago, or remnants of civilizations that thrived thousands of years in the past. This invisible layer of ...

The Planetary Alignments That Affected Earth's History

The Planetary Alignments That Affected Earth’s History

Jan Otte

Have you ever wondered how the dance of planets billions of miles away could shape life on our very own planet? Throughout Earth’s vast 4.5-billion-year history, the gravitational ballet performed by celestial bodies has orchestrated some of the most dramatic climate shifts and evolutionary leaps our world has ever witnessed. While most of us think ...

Utah's Fossil Caves Reveal Ancient Sea Life

Utah’s Fossil Caves Reveal Ancient Sea Life

Gargi Chakravorty

Imagine venturing deep into Utah’s remote caves, flashlight in hand, only to discover the perfectly preserved remains of creatures that swam in ancient oceans hundreds of millions of years ago. This isn’t a fantasy – it’s happening right now across Utah’s desert landscape. From the House Range in Millard County to the depths of Boomerang ...

Lords of an Ancient Jungle

Fossil Forest Found in Illinois Mine

Jan Otte

Deep beneath Illinois farmland lies one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 21st century. The preserved remains of an entire tropical forest, frozen in time for over three hundred million years, reveal extraordinary details about life on Earth before dinosaurs even existed. This spectacular find has changed our understanding of ancient ecosystems and ...

Preparing for the Unthinkable: Supervolcano Mitigation Strategies

Could Supervolcanoes Cause the Next Mass Extinction?

Andrew Alpin

Picture this: you wake up one morning to find ash falling like snow across your city. The skies turn an ominous gray, temperatures plummet, and the sun becomes a dim memory hidden behind thick volcanic clouds. While it sounds like something from a disaster movie, this scenario has happened before in Earth’s history. Supervolcanoes – ...

an underwater view of corals and sponges in the ocean

How Ancient Coral Reefs Record Earth’s Climate Millions of Years Ago

Suhail Ahmed

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 ...

ship and stones on bulletin

Forgotten Arctic Fossils May Hold Clues to Mammalian Origins

Suhail Ahmed

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 Evidence Links Volcanic Winters to the Dawn of Dinosaur Dominance

Jan Otte

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 ...