To spread awareness that “climate change isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a human story woven into the fabric of our civilization’s rise and fall,” Georgetown University historian Professor ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

Earth’s Ediacaran Period, roughly 630 to 540 million years ago, has always been something of a magnetic minefield for scientists. During earlier and later time periods, tectonic plates kept a steady ...

Earth's climate has swung between ice ages and warmer periods for millions of years, driven by subtle changes in our planet's orbit and axial tilt. These variations, known as Milankovitch cycles, ...

Smithsonian researcher Ingrid Romero studies fossil pollen to reconstruct ancient climates and predict future changes Erin Wunderlich Researcher Ingrid Romero holds a case full of pollen slides at the ...

A pair of scorched worlds circling the red dwarf TRAPPIST-1 now offer one of the clearest looks yet at what life may be up ...

It transports far more than 100 times as much water as all of the Earth's rivers combined: The Antarctic Circumpolar Current rushes around the southern continent unhindered by land masses and is ...

Climate change has traditionally been associated with extreme weather events like heatwaves and floods. However, recent studies indicate that its effects extend beyond these phenomena. Scientists have ...

Earth’s climate is wildly out of balance, and there is no precedent in recorded history for what is happening now on our planet. That’s the conclusion of the World Meteorological Organization’s annual ...