Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet tycoon who paid tens of millions of dollars to go to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz craft, recounts his arrival in space–blinking, ...

Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps edited by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History University of Chicago Press, 2020 ($65) Strata are the ribboned horizontal layers of minerals and ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the philosophy and ethics of science and technology. This article is more than 6 years old. There’s no doubt that ...

Earth's 4.5 billion year geological history is full of death and rebirth, mass extinctions and explosions of biodiversity, with different periods often marked by cataclysmic changes that radically ...

Are we really living in the Anthropocene, the geological time marked by the global impact of human activity? And if so, when did it begin? These are questions that the Anthropocene Working Group is ...

There's no doubt that humans have had a powerful impact on the planet, but some scientists believe the effects are so clear and widespread that our current time period should be declared the dawn of a ...

Despite seeming like a relatively stable place, the Earth's surface has changed dramatically over the past 4.6 billion years. Mountains have been built and eroded, continents and oceans have moved ...

It would be called the Anthropocene. The word was coined by chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen at a conference in 2000. It denotes a new geological epoch, beginning about 200 years ago at the ...

This image is taken from the Geologic Time Viewer, a project presented last week at MIT, which shows how materials created over millions of years in geologic time are now a part of our everyday lives.

Learn how the fossils of ancient organisms help scientists navigate deep time — and uncover Earth’s hidden history. In the late 1700s, while inspecting a coal mine in southwest England, a young ...

The idea was born in Mexico, in the year 2000. It was pure improvisation by Paul Crutzen, one of the world’s most respected scientists. The Dutch scholar was widely known for arguing that all-out ...