Despite the enormous mass of the Earth, simply depleting our groundwater is changing our axial tilt. Simple Newtonian physics explains why.
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The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth's crust.
Lasers, mirrors, and computational advances can all work together to push ground-based astronomy past the limits of our atmosphere.
When battles raged in ancient cities, their rocks blazed so brightly that they could be reoriented according to Earth's magnetic field.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, matter can escape the center of the Earth.
13.8 columnist Marcelo Gleiser reflects on his recent voyage to Earth's last wild continent.
At least one of Earth's creatures is able to survive the vacuum of space.
In the early stages of our Solar System, there were three life-friendly planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Only Earth thrived. Here's why.
Looking back on our planet's early history offers a new (and less crazy) meaning for the idea of a "flat Earth."
Fantasy, meet statistics: The census comes to Middle-earth!
The Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas are the last surviving fragments of a body of water that stretched from Austria to Turkmenistan.
Despite the vast number of planets in the Universe, Earth's specific evolutionary history guarantees that its life forms — including humans — are utterly unique.
No matter how you define the end, including the demise of humanity, all life, or even the planet itself, our ultimate destruction awaits.
"Superhabitable" planets might be real, but Earth is probably as good as it gets.
In a recent paper, biologists outlined a three-part hypothesis for how all life as we know it began.
Our cosmic home, planet Earth, has been through a lot over the past 4.5 billion years. Here are some of its most spectacular changes
Known as the Great Oxygenation Event, Earth froze over as oxygen accumulated in our atmosphere, nearly driving all life extinct.
Dispatches host Kmele Foster is on a journey to understand humanity’s role in the cosmos. His first stop? The Atacama Plateau in Northern Chile, home to the darkest deserts and largest telescopes on earth.
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For billions of years on Earth, life was limited to simple unicellular, non-differentiated organisms. In a mere flash, that changed forever.
Retired astronaut Ron Garan believes that before we can begin solving our problems, we must understand our interrelatedness through the "orbital perspective."
A combination of factors make the weather at New Hampshire's Mount Washington arguably the most brutal in the world.
Frozen adversity set the stage for an explosion of diversity.
Seventy-five years after the anomaly's discovery, scientists have finally figured out why sea levels are so much lower here.
Many impact craters on Earth have been erased thanks to wind, water, and plate tectonics. But scientists have clever ways to find them.
Out of the four rocky planets in our Solar System, only Earth presently has plate tectonics. But billions of years ago, Venus had them, too.
Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets — very few of which resemble Earth.
Some microbes can withstand Earth's most inhospitable corners, hinting that life may be able to survive similarly extreme conditions on other worlds.
Although early Earth was a molten hellscape, once it cooled, life arose almost immediately. That original chain of life remains unbroken.
Even if you aren't in the path of totality, you can still use the solar eclipse to measure how long it takes the Moon to orbit Earth.
The Earth that exists today wasn't formed simultaneously with the Sun and the other planets. In some ways, we're quite a latecomer.