The coastline near Derwent Howe, in England’s Cumbria, hardly seems a place where geologists would find new things. They’ve been studying the area for two centuries and mapped the region in great ...

Almost 20 years ago, New Scientist ran a feature called “Imagine Earth without people”, a thought experiment about what would happen to our planet over thousands of years if humanity suddenly ...

In 2008, Canadian researchers led by McGill PhD student Jonathan O'Neil said they'd found the world's oldest rocks, formed 4.3 billion years ago in what is now northwestern Quebec. Such rocks would ...

A remote outcrop in Canada harbors rocks that are at least 4.16 billion years old, researchers report June 26 in Science. If true, these rocks would be the oldest known on Earth and the first to date ...

Mysterious micro-burrows in desert marble and limestone were probably made by microbes that lived millions of years ago. Exactly what kind of microbes bored into the rock remains unknown, as does ...