Earth's earliest life left behind very few chemical traces. Fragile remains, like ancient cells and microbial mats, were buried, squeezed, heated, and broken apart by the planet's shifting crust ...

A machine-learning-enhanced approach to chemical analysis is drastically expanding the chemical record of life on Earth, and it could help us find evidence of life on other planets too. Reading time 3 ...

Researchers have discovered the world's oldest known arc-slicing fault in Australia, intensifying the debate over the origins of plate tectonics. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Rocks in Australia preserve evidence that plates in Earth’s crust were moving 3.5 billion years ago, a finding that pushes back the beginnings of plate tectonics by hundreds of millions of years.

In Earth’s early days, more than 4 billion years ago, the surface was a dangerous and unpredictable place. Violent volcanoes, crashing meteorites, and constant tectonic activity repeatedly resurfaced ...

New method also detects molecular signs of photosynthesis almost 1 billion years earlier than previously documented; Combining chemistry and AI, pioneering method could revolutionize search for ...

Jaganmoy Jodder received funding from the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Integrated Mineral and Energy Resource Analysis (CIMERA) and Genus DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences. Our ...

A 2.5-billion-year-old rock from South Africa's Gamohaan Formation. AI analysis suggests the dark structures preserved in the rock are the remains of a complex microbial community. Pairing ...