Blurs

Sometimes a fossil is more than the remains of a dead animal. Sometimes it is a geographical mystery.  A creature is discovered thousands of miles from where scientists expected it to be. A tropical species turns up in what was once a surprisingly cold region. A land animal appears on an island separated from the mainland by an ocean. A familiar species is found in rocks that suggest an environment completely unlike the one its living relatives inhabit. These discoveries can force scientists to reconsider ancient geography, climate and migration. But they also raise a more intriguing question: How many times have we underestimated the ability of prehistoric animals to cross the planet? The world they inhabited wasn't the world we know today. Continents moved. Seas appeared and disappeared. Land bridges formed and vanished. Ice sheets expanded. Deserts became grasslands, and forests spread across regions that are now frozen or barren. Coastlines also migrated by hundreds of kilometr...

Look at Saturn and it is difficult not to wonder what Earth would look like with rings. A vast band of ice and rock stretching across the sky. A permanent feature visible from the surface. Shadows moving across the planet as the ring system changed with the seasons. It sounds like science fiction. But Earth may actually have had something resembling a ring system in its distant past. Not necessarily a beautiful, permanent structure like Saturn's — but a temporary ring of debris could have formed around our planet after a massive collision. And the most intriguing possibility is that such an event may have played a role in creating the Moon. Earth wasn't always the quiet planet we know today The young Solar System was a chaotic place. Planets were still forming. Asteroids and planetary embryos were moving through unstable orbits, occasionally crossing paths. Collisions were not unusual. Some were relatively small. Others were catastrophic. The leading explanation for the Moon...

We tend to think of Earth's climate as something relatively stable. There are warm places. Cold places. Wet places. Dry places. Ice at the poles. Deserts near the tropics. Forests covering parts of the continents. It feels permanent because human civilisation has existed for such a tiny fraction of Earth's history. But zoom out. Earth is not climatically stable at all. Over billions of years, our planet has moved between conditions that would be almost unrecognisable to us. There have been periods when ice reached surprisingly low latitudes. There have been times when Antarctica supported forests. There have been enormous changes in atmospheric composition. There have been episodes of extreme greenhouse warming. And there have been periods when much of the planet may have been covered in ice. The Earth we know today is only one possible climate state. So how different can our planet actually become? The Earth has never had just one climate Climate isn't determined by temper...

When we think about unexplored places, our minds tend to go upwards. Space. Distant planets. The far side of the Moon. Perhaps an undiscovered world orbiting another star. But there is an extraordinary fact hiding in plain sight: We live on the surface of a planet that we have barely explored beneath our feet. We have sent spacecraft millions of kilometres into space. We have photographed distant galaxies. We have mapped enormous areas of the ocean floor from orbit. Yet deep below the ground is another world — one of rock, pressure, heat, water and microscopic life — that remains extraordinarily difficult to access. So just how much of Earth is still unknown? We haven't physically explored most of the deep Earth. Earth has a radius of roughly 6,371 kilometres. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled — the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia — reached just over 12 kilometres. That sounds impressive. And it is. But compared with the size of the planet, it barely scratches the surface...