The dazzling lights of the aurora are created when high-energy particles from space collide with Earth's atmosphere. While ...

Andy Weir’s bestselling story The Martian predicts that by 2035 NASA will have landed humans on Mars three times, perfected return-to-Earth flight systems and collaborated with the China National ...

A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered ...

Sometimes to truly study something up close, you have to take a step back. That's what Andrea Donnellan does. An expert in Earth sciences and seismology, she gets much of her data from a bird's-eye ...

Gary Glatzmaier, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his excellence in original scientific research.

In the bigger picture, "down" could be defined as being below the plane of the solar system, which is known as the ecliptic. By convention, we say that above the plane is where the planets are seen to ...

Scientists are trying to understand why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere changed by about 90 parts per million (ppmv) between icy (glacial) and warmer (interglacial) periods in Earth’s history.

At the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, one tectonic plate is moving underneath another. New experimental work at UC Davis shows how rocks on faults deep in the Earth can cement ...

I’m a planetary scientist who was born the year of Sputnik’s launch. Over the course of my 40-year career, I’ve witnessed not one but at least five separate revolutions that fundamentally transformed ...