But this isn’t a worldwide consensus. The number of continents, it seems, depends on who you ask. The answer may have seemed clear in elementary school, but in truth, there is no single, definitive ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

Crystals hidden in Australia’s oldest rocks have revealed new clues about how Earth and the Moon formed. The study suggests ...

If you were to arrive in our solar system never having seen it before, you’d be impressed with variety. Giant gas planets with rings, moons spanning from minuscule to enormous, icy comets that hurtle ...

For centuries, the world has accepted the idea that Earth is divided into seven continents: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, ...

New research examining over 20 years of data captured by NASA’s twin climate satellites, GRACE and GRACE-FO, has revealed an “unprecedented” level of water loss among the planet’s continents, creating ...

The first half-billion years of Earth science were gnarly. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When Earth was just a wee young thing, ...

Once the world reopened, the Lippe-McGraws were back in motion. There was Nevis, a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea, at age 3 ...

There are seven continents on Earth, or so we learned in school. But it turns out that these designations are not as straightforward as they seem, and different scientists have different views on how ...

Classical plate tectonic theory was developed in the 1960s. It proposed that the outer layer of our planet is made up of a small number of rigid plates separated by narrow boundaries. The surface of ...

Nick's work has received grants from the Australian government and Australian Research Council From the 1950s until recently, we thought we had a clear idea of how continents form. Most people will ...