To spread awareness that “climate change isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a human story woven into the fabric of our civilization’s rise and fall,” Georgetown University historian Professor ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising mechanism that may explain how Earth cooled dramatically after the age of dinosaurs.

As Earth’s climate changes, one of the hardest things to figure out is exactly how the planet will change in response. And while we can’t know the future for sure, we can get a lot of good clues from ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

Our planet has experienced dramatic climate shifts throughout its history, oscillating between freezing "icehouse" periods ...

At the edge of East Antarctica, where the wind howls through a white emptiness and the air bites harder than steel, scientists uncovered something so old it makes even time feel young. Beneath that ...

Earth’s Ediacaran Period, roughly 630 to 540 million years ago, has always been something of a magnetic minefield for scientists. During earlier and later time periods, tectonic plates kept a steady ...

Paul Wilcox descends into Devil’s Canopy Cave on Prince of Wales Island. An unlikely discovery in a cave on Prince of Wales Island could help scientists understand Earth’s climate history. A small ...

Smithsonian researcher Ingrid Romero studies fossil pollen to reconstruct ancient climates and predict future changes Erin Wunderlich Researcher Ingrid Romero holds a case full of pollen slides at the ...