A 2023 astronaut photo shows three dark hills, or mesas, towering above part of the Sahara desert in southern Mauritania. The ...

The key to determining which planets could host extraterrestrial life could be growing in the harshest deserts of Earth in the form of lichen. The secret to this discovery: the "world's best sunscreen ...

Imagine watching a football field of fertile land transform into barren desert every four seconds. That's the staggering pace ...

"A very remarkable series of events took place during the late Miocene between 5.96 and 5.33 million years ago." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Flamingos feed in Laguna Chaxa, a salt-rich lagoon in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It’s a location that flamingos have adapted to live in over millennia. But each year, is still a struggle. November 2024.

By pairing rover data with fieldwork in the UAE, the team showed how nearly identical processes can sculpt landscapes on two ...

Explore the 15 hottest places on Earth, from record-breaking temperatures to sizzling cities with blazing annual averages, ...

The Atacama Desert—an arid, unpopulated swath of northern Chile that is home to some of the most perceptive ground telescopes on Earth—is actually teeming with life beneath the ground, according to a ...

For decades, scientists have puzzled over why Earth stayed warm and alive while Mars turned cold and dry. Both planets began with similar ingredients—rocky surfaces, carbon, water, and sunlight—but ...

About ten years ago, science writer Ferris Jabr started contemplating Earth as a living planet rather than a planet with life on it. It began when he learned that the Amazon rainforest doesn't simply ...