"Our study provides us with another important clue in the mystery of how continents formed and spread across Earth..."

A new discovery challenges understanding of how quickly life recovered from the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history.

Fossil evidence of how the earliest life on Earth came to be is hard to come by. But scientists have come up with a few theories based on the microbes, viruses and prions existing today.

In mythologies from around the world, various cultures and religions point to clay as the primordial material of life. Is that more accurate than we think?

"Our theory has the potential to address not just how Earth became habitable, but also why life emerged on it," researchers say.

For the first 500 million years of Earth’s existence, oceans may have had a salt level as high as 7.5%. By comparison, oceans today are about 2.5% salt.

Life doesn’t just need water and oxygen to thrive, it also needs iron.

Erupting volcanoes, and not a geologic or chemical process, may have led to the first puff of oxygen in the atmopshere of the early Earth.

Ancient marine organisms have shed light on 66 million years of carbon dioxide levels and what it means for modern carbon emissions.

A new study suggests Earth’s primordial ocean 3 to 4 billion years ago may have been much larger than it is today, and possibly covered the entire planet.