A colossal ocean current encircling Antarctica—stronger than all the world’s rivers combined—played a far more complex role in shaping Earth’s climate than scientists once thought. New research shows ...

When you picture a desert, you probably imagine a vast, empty landscape far from any water. But surprisingly, some of the driest places on Earth lie right beside the ocean. Both the Atacama, in Chile, ...

In the dry, sun-scorched deserts of Ethiopia, a slow but astonishing transformation has been unfolding since 2005. A 35-mile-long crack, known as the East African Rift, is gradually tearing through ...

Our planet's lithosphere is broken into several tectonic plates. Their configuration is ever-shifting, as supercontinents are assembled and broken up, and oceans form, grow, and then start to close in ...

The accretion of new material during Pluto’s formation may have generated enough heat to create a liquid ocean that has persisted beneath an icy crust to the present day, despite the dwarf planet’s ...

Scientific models have predicted that climate change will drive oceans in the Northern Hemisphere to warm faster than oceans ...