Scientists have identified three definitive supercontinents in Earth's history and ... called Columbia, or Nuna, existed from around 1.7 billion years ago to 1.45 billion years ago in the ...

Some of the zircons date to 4.3 billion years ago, meaning they existed when Earth was a mere 200 million years old — a baby, geologically speaking. Researchers used these zircons, as well as ...

About 1.8 billion years ago ... helps lock in Earth’s warmth, but the dearth of oxygen poses a problem: Methane degrades in ultraviolet light; if the ozone layer barely existed, as Kasting ...

The water that supports life on Earth may ... More than 4.5 billion years ago — or about 15 million years after solid bodies began to form around the young sun — water existed in the outer ...

The disputed champion, Minnesota’s Morton Gneiss, contains zircons dating to 2.6 billion, 3.3 billion and 3.5 billion years ago ... about how we reconstruct Earth’s history.

But rocks older than 3.5 billion years can be found on all ... returned from Mars, samples exist in the form of meteorites that fell to Earth long ago, allowing scientists to make approximations ...

A new analysis of ancient grains of crystal embedded in rock from the Australian outback suggests Earth had dry land and fresh water some 4 billion years ... existed on Earth so long ago.

The Great Oxygenation Event, which occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, was one of ... which didn’t exist yet, something similar was going on in early Earth. As continents grew, so did the ...

Roughly 3.26 billion years ago, Earth had a “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” moment. A monster meteor dubbed “S2”—roughly the size of four Mount Everests and up to 200 times ...

Earth as we know it today looked drastically different several billion years ago. According to a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the composition ...

NASA astrobiologist Laurie Barge and team, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, set out to demonstrate how organic molecules might have formed 4 billion years ago ... element ...