Earth Sciences

Snakes are a paradox of the fossil record. There are more than 4,000 species alive today, slithering through deserts, rivers, treetops and soil on every continent but Antarctica, one of evolution's…

In a volcanic corner of northeastern Catalonia, a good deal of the local disaster history had never lived in any single place. Some of it sat in government seismic catalogues. Some was buried in a…

The place where most of Earth's surface is made lies kilometres underwater, in near-total darkness, along a seam that winds around the planet like the stitching on a baseball. Mid-ocean ridges are…