Researchers find that shifts in Earth’s orbit can trigger abrupt climate changes, even in warm periods without ice sheets.

Carbon released from Earth's spreading tectonic plates, not volcanoes, may have triggered major transitions between ancient ...

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 ...

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 ...

This video examines a moment in Earth’s history when environmental change occurred far faster than expected. Geological and ...

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 ...

A tree-ringed African lake has yielded a record of Earth's magnetic field spanning the past 150,000 years. A core of rock and sediment drilled from the bottom of Lake Chala, a picturesque crater lake ...

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is. Some 4 billion ...

After years as a professional research assistant at INSTAAR’s stable isotope lab, Valerie Morris estimates she’s processed more than 10 kilometers of ice from around the world. “You’ve done more ice ...

The Earth’s climate is a dynamic entity, continuously evolving over billions of years with alternating periods of extreme heat and cold. Recent scientific studies indicate that the Earth is subtly ...