Scientists have long thought that tectonic plates needed to dive beneath each other to create the chemical fingerprint we see in continents.

Earth is the only known planet which has plate tectonics today. The constant movement of these giant slabs of rock over the planet's magma creates continents - and may have even helped create life.

New research suggests that Earth's first crust, formed over 4.5 billion years ago, already carried the chemical traits we ...

Water is at the center of one of the enduring questions about how life first formed on Earthr. More specifically, where did ...

About 4.5 billion years ago, the moon formed. Violently. A Mars-size object collided with Earth, turning its surface into ...

Precambrian time covers the vast bulk of the Earth's history, starting with the planet's creation about 4.5 billion years ago and ending with the emergence of complex, multicelled life-forms ...

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Scientists think that by 4.3 billion years ago, Earth may have developed conditions suitable to support life. The oldest known fossils, however, are only 3.7 ...

Although Earth itself cohered into a planet around 4.5 billion years ago, most estimates suggest it took at least another 800 million years before the earliest lifeforms developed. But while ...

Billions of years ago, the fourth planet from the sun could have been mistaken for Earth’s smaller twin ... past—up until about 4.12 to 4.14 billion years ago—Mars seems to have had an ...

Our planet’s first known mass extinction happened about 440 million years ago. Species diversity on Earth had been increasing over a period of roughly 30 million years, but that would come to a ...

Narrator: 4 and a half billion years ago, clouds of cosmic dust and gas which were orbiting the Sun collided into one another, creating the Earth, our planet, the home of mankind. It spins at 1000 ...