Long before oceans teemed with life, Earth endured relentless violence. Asteroids slammed into its surface again and again, reshaping the young planet.

With water covering the majority of our planet, scientists have been wading through ideas to answer a fundamental question: Where did it all come from? A popular theory suggests asteroids or comets ...

Earth is the only life-supporting planet we know of, so it's tempting to use it as a standard in the search for life elsewhere. But the modern Earth can't serve as a basis for evaluating exoplanets ...

As energy from the sun reaches Earth, some solar radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, leading to chemical reactions like the formation of ozone and the breakup of gas molecules. A new approach for ...

Ancient volcanic rocks from Western Australia suggest that water was reaching deep into Earth’s interior more than three ...

IMAGE: A new study by CU-Boulder researchers indicates a thick organic haze shrouding Earth several billion years ago was similar to the one now hovering over Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. University ...

Water has made the Earth the planet that it is—a planet known for its blue oceans. Water shapes the land through erosion and is fundamental to Earth’s ability to support life. But we have a hard time ...

When you think about a large asteroid impact, you might imagine a moment of devastation: a violent collision, a blast of heat and debris, and then years of atmospheric disruption and damage left ...

One broken piece of quartz in a physics lab could shed light on the history of life on Earth and the search for other habitable worlds. Today, most life as we know it depends on oxygen. Specifically, ...