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 ...

As humans alter the planet’s climate and ecosystems, scientists are looking to Earth’s history to help predict what may unfold from climate change. To this end, massive ice structures like glaciers ...

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 ...

Our planet plunged into one of the most dramatic climate states in its long history, approximately 720–635 million years ago.

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 ...

At the edge of East Antarctica, where the wind howls through a white emptiness and the air bites harder than steel, scientists uncovered something so old it makes even time feel young. Beneath that ...

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 ...

For decades, climate science has treated Earth’s shifting crust as a slow, distant backdrop to the drama of global warming. New research is rewriting that script, showing that the way continents drift ...