About 252 million years ago, more than 81 percent of animal life in the oceans and 89 percent of animal life on land went extinct. This event, called the "end-Permian mass extinction" (EPME), ...

Geologists think early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where jet-black lava fields extend as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides rise steeply above the clouds and stark black-sand ...

Some of the Earth’s oldest rocks may have formed from the high temperatures of meteorite impacts, a new study reports. Granite-like, or felsic, rocks in northwest Canada dating back to the Earth’s ...

Top: Map of thorium concentrations near Compton crater on the lunar far side. Bottom: LRO view of the felsic highland volcano. After Jolliff et al. (2011), Nature Geoscience 4, 566. The flood of new ...

The rocks at the surface of the modern Earth are broadly divided into two types: felsic and mafic. Felsic rocks are generally relatively low density — for a rock — and light in colour because they are ...

The early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where lava fields stretch as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides tower above the clouds and stark black sand beaches outline the land. But the ...