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 ...

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 ...

Despite seeming like a relatively stable place, the Earth's surface has changed dramatically over the past 4.6 billion years. Mountains have been built and eroded, continents and oceans have moved ...

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 ...

Learn how the fossils of ancient organisms help scientists navigate deep time — and uncover Earth’s hidden history. In the late 1700s, while inspecting a coal mine in southwest England, a young ...

This image is taken from the Geologic Time Viewer, a project presented last week at MIT, which shows how materials created over millions of years in geologic time are now a part of our everyday lives.

No work on any science has yet been published in our language more exhaustive of facts, more clear in statement, or more philosophical in general character and arrangement, than Dana’s “ Mineralogy,” ...