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 ...

According to the study authors, a collision between the Congo and São Francisco cratons — ancient continents that existed more than 2 billion years ago ... we see on Earth today," Chi ...

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 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 ...

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 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 ...

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.

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 ...