The dazzling lights of the aurora are created when high-energy particles from space collide with Earth's atmosphere. While ...

Sometimes to truly study something up close, you have to take a step back. That's what Andrea Donnellan does. An expert in Earth sciences and seismology, she gets much of her data from a bird's-eye ...

Gary Glatzmaier, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his excellence in original scientific research.

At the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, one tectonic plate is moving underneath another. New experimental work at UC Davis shows how rocks on faults deep in the Earth can cement ...

Scientists are trying to understand why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere changed by about 90 parts per million (ppmv) between icy (glacial) and warmer (interglacial) periods in Earth’s history.

For a long time, scientists assumed that Earth's water was delivered by asteroids and comets billions of years ago. This coincided with the Late Heavy Bombardment (ca. 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago), a ...

Researchers discovered a new field of ancient tektites in South Australia, revealing a long-forgotten asteroid impact. These 11-million-year-old glass fragments differ chemically and geographically ...

It was long thought, up until recently, that asteroids and comets delivered Earth's oceans during the early Solar System.

In the bigger picture, "down" could be defined as being below the plane of the solar system, which is known as the ecliptic. By convention, we say that above the plane is where the planets are seen to ...

I’m a planetary scientist who was born the year of Sputnik’s launch. Over the course of my 40-year career, I’ve witnessed not one but at least five separate revolutions that fundamentally transformed ...