Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet tycoon who paid tens of millions of dollars to go to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz craft, recounts his arrival in space–blinking, ...

Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps edited by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History University of Chicago Press, 2020 ($65) Strata are the ribboned horizontal layers of minerals and ...

There's no doubt that humans have had a powerful impact on the planet, but some scientists believe the effects are so clear and widespread that our current time period should be declared the dawn of a ...

Earth's 4.5 billion year geological history is full of death and rebirth, mass extinctions and explosions of biodiversity, with different periods often marked by cataclysmic changes that radically ...

Humans are having such a marked impact on the Earth that they are changing its geology, creating new and distinctive strata that will persist far into the future. This is the idea behind the ...

The Anthropocene is one of those rare scientific terms that has entered the public consciousness, which is ironic, given that geologists have not yet fully defined it. As Ian Randall discovers, the ...

For years, the term “Anthropocene” has been used to informally describe the human era on Earth. But new evidence suggests there’s nothing informal about it. We’re a true force of nature — and there’s ...

The idea was born in Mexico, in the year 2000. It was pure improvisation by Paul Crutzen, one of the world's most respected scientists. The Dutch scholar was widely known for arguing that all-out ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the philosophy and ethics of science and technology. This article is more than 6 years old. There’s no doubt that ...

A new study suggests that key geological markers align towards a start for the Anthropocene somewhere between 1952 to 1955, based on signals from nuclear testing and fossil fuel burning. An ...

What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? The first thing that might come to mind is a meteorite crashing into the Earth. Assistant Professor Honami Sato, a geology researcher at the Faculty of ...