EarthDate

One of the great mysteries of the pyramids may have been solved—by state-of-the-art radar systems that can penetrate the desert sand. The Egyptian pharaohs built 90 pyramids, with the most famous, at Giza, constructed almost 5,000 years ago. At nearly 500 feet, the Great Pyramid of Khufu was the world’s tallest manmade structure for almost 4,000 years! To build it, 20,000 workers assembled 2.3 mil...

After the dinosaurs, giant mammals ruled Earth for millions of years—then suddenly, most of them disappeared. What happened? When the Chicxulub asteroid struck, and plunged Earth into darkness and cold, large dinosaurs became extinct. Early mammals—small, warm-blooded and covered in fur—were able to survive. And, over a few million years, they grew in size to occupy the environmental niches the di...

For many thousands of years, humans have used medicinal plants to help heal wounds. It turns out, some of our primate relatives may have, too. In Indonesia, scientists observed a large male orangutan with an open wound on his face. To their surprise, he sought out a special plant called akar kuning that orangutans usually do not eat. He consumed a large quantity of leaves, then chewed more into a...

Turns out it was much easier to go to outer space than to inner Earth. In the 1950s, the U.S. and Russia began competitive spaceflight programs. Twenty-five years later, the U.S. Voyager spacecraft had gone 10 billion miles into space. Around the same time, both countries also began drilling programs trying to pierce through Earth’s crust to reach the mantle below. The U.S. project began drilling...

In the deepest, darkest ocean, caustic, superhot water teems with life. In the rest of the ocean, the food web is built on photosynthesis. Phytoplankton takes in sunlight and carbon dioxide to give food and oxygen to everything else. But with no sunlight, these deep ocean communities thrive by chemosynthesis—they consume chemical compounds. In the 1970s, scientists were amazed to discover previous...

The Moon has inspired humans for countless generations. Among moons, ours is large, about a quarter the size of Earth. But we have only one. Other planets have many. And some have none. Where do they come from, and how do planets acquire them? Our moon is unique in the solar system. It came from an impact, when an asteroid the size of Mars slammed into Earth 4 billion years ago and smashed off a b...

Beware, there’s a humongous fungus among us! And if you visit the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, you can walk among it—though you might not know it… Unless you notice that many of the spruce trees are sprouting mushrooms. And if you DNA tested them, you’d see that each one is genetically identical—because they’re all part of a single gigantic organism, a clonal colony of Armillaria ostoyae, th...

When the first geologists explored the Grand Canyon, they discovered a billion-year mystery that we still haven’t solved. John Wesley Powell, on his 1868 expedition, called the mile-high canyon walls the “The Library of the Gods” – where he saw 2 billion years of Earth’s history piled in rock layers one atop the other … Except, he realized, there were hundreds of millions of years of rock layers m...

Four to six thousand years ago, humans invented metallurgy. Until that time—for 99 percent of hominid history—we were living in the Stone Age. The earliest evidence of prehumans using stone tools comes from 3.4 million years ago, with tool marks found on fossil animal bones in East Africa. The earliest, very primitive stone tools come from 3.3 million years ago, probably used by Australopithecus o...

How ‘bout a boa burger? Or snake steak? As the world’s population looks for more sources of protein, snakes in the constrictor family may be the perfect choice. That’s because, over millions of years, they’ve evolved to grow and maintain a healthy body weight while eating little. Recently, researchers studied Burmese and reticulated pythons bred for consumption in snake farms in Vietnam and Thaila...

Have you ever seen those beautiful satellite images of Earth and wondered what camera could take them? The answer is no camera could. They’re produced by a multispectral scanner developed in the 1950s at Hughes Aircraft by a team led by the young MIT scientist Virginia Norwood—known today as the “Mother of Landsat.” Landsat, Earth-imaging satellites, were first launched in 1972 by NASA with the go...

Three times in Earth’s long history, a process called endosymbiosis has occurred. And it has totally changed life on Earth. Two billion years ago, all life was single-celled organisms in an oxygen-free environment. Some of these bacteria-like creatures engulfed others into their cell walls and began a symbiotic relationship called endosymbiosis. The smaller organisms became organelles within the l...

For thousands of years, humans have found shelter in lava tubes. In the future, they may do the same—on the Moon! A lava tube is a cave. It forms when lava flowing in a channel forms a crust on the upper surface that’s exposed to cooler air. The crust insulates the lava below, which gets superheated and melts a deeper tube-shaped channel as lava continues to flow through it. When the lava runs out...

Ozone makes up a tiny portion of Earth’s atmosphere, but it allows for life on Earth. The oxygen we breathe is what’s called molecular oxygen, O2—two atoms of oxygen bonded together. High above Earth’s surface, in the stratosphere, the Sun’s intense radiation splits those oxygen molecules, and a tiny fraction reform as ozone, or O3—three oxygen atoms, with a very important property. Ozone absorbs...

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are the most powerful explosions in our solar system—too large, heavy and fast-moving to imagine. But they’re not the same thing. They occur mostly when the Sun’s magnetic poles prepare to flip, every 11 years or so, in an event called a “solar maximum.” Magnetic fields deep within the Sun punch up to create two very different anomalies on the surface: Solar...

Dinosaurs, like most large animals today, had long lives. Therapods like T. rex lived to about 30 years, while giant sauropods could live to 60. And over those long lifespans, like all of us, they got sick. Soft tissues don’t fossilize as well as bone, but scientists have documented diseases, from the mundane to the mortal, in all types of dinosaurs. Feathered dinosaurs had dandruff. Others showed...

It may appear that tides come in and out. But that’s not really what happens. In fact, the Moon pulls the ocean toward it, creating what’s called a “tidal bulge” of higher water surface. The tidal bulge happens on the side of Earth facing the Moon, with a balancing but slightly lower bulge on the other side of Earth. As Earth rotates, land masses come into contact with these higher water levels an...

Many evolutionary advances, like big brains, have given humans an advantage over other animals. Perhaps one of the least appreciated is the thumb. Specifically, the opposable thumb--meaning opposite our fingers--with the ability to touch each finger across the palm, enabling our hands to manipulate small objects. Around 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals had opposable thumbs, but they were much less...

On September 17, 2024 we’ll have a Super Harvest Bloody Moon. Kind of a fantastical, creepy name, but those three adjectives each describe a different celestial event, which will coincide in this one moon. A Harvest Moon is the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox, called that because it gave farmers some extra light to bring in their crops. There’s a Harvest Moon every year, but not often so cl...

The first dinosaur fossil documented by a scientist was 350 years ago, in 1677. It was part of a femur discovered in a shale mine in England, then sent to a local museum. The curator had never seen anything like it. He thought it must be a thigh bone from a war elephant, from some ancient battle. Or the femoral head of a giant human, as described in the Bible. At any rate, he published an illustra...

Sharks have been so successful, for so much longer than so many other lifeforms, that you could call Earth the shark planet. They evolved over 400 million years ago, meaning they’re older than trees. They’re 6 times older than the North Star! And over a thousand times older than humans. They’ve survived all 5 known mass extinction events. Over that long, long period, they’ve diverged into hundreds...

For nearly 60 years, an international deep ocean drilling program has revolutionized earth science and understanding. Two research ships in particular, the Glomar Challenger, later replaced by the JOIDES Resolution, have drilled hundreds of miles of ocean sediment core, in every ocean. These cores provide a record of Earth stretching back millions of years. They’ve allowed scientists to validate t...

In 1797, in central Kentucky, a hunter chased a bear into a hole in a cliff … and discovered the longest cave network in the world, 10 million years in the making. But at that time, all he could see—and smell—was bat guano, which was then the valuable source of saltpeter, a key component in gunpowder. Within a year, prospectors were mining centuries of bat droppings for military efforts. During th...

You might think that plants are stationary, but did you know they can dance? Many flowers do a daily sun dance, swinging from east to west, to produce more pollen and attract insect pollinators. They make this movement using two methods: Plants contain a compound called phototropin that responds to being in shadow by causing cells to elongate. In this way, the dark side of the plant grows longer,...

In the beginning, Earth was hell. The planet was completely molten, a roiling sea of magma at temperatures of thousands of degrees. Scientists even referenced Hades to name this period: Hadean Earth. How did it become the green paradise we know today? Well, over about half a billion years, it cooled. And how it cooled has shaped some important traits of Earth to this day. Logically then, scientist...