Cyanobacteria, as they still exist today, were the first organisms to carry out photosynthesis and release oxygen. Produced in primeval oceans about 2.5 billion years ago, this oxygen accumulated in ...

When you look at photographs of Earth from space, the planet looks like a blue marble, with patterns of clouds lying on the surface of the marble. It seems as if Earth's atmosphere is incredibly thin, ...

thermal characteristics (temperature changes), chemical composition, movement, and density. Each of the layers are bounded by "pauses" where the greatest changes in thermal characteristics, chemical ...

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key ...

Using primitive meteorites called chondrites as their models, earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have performed outgassing calculations and shown that the early Earth ...

Researchers have created a dataset of the whole atmosphere, enabling new research to be conducted on previously difficult-to-study regions. Using a new data-assimilation system called JAGUAR-DAS, ...