Most of the planets we’ve identified are in orbit around stars and formed from the disks of gas and dust that surrounded the ...

Deserts are often dismissed as empty wastelands of sand and sun, but these arid landscapes hide some of the most perplexing ...

Flamingos feed in Laguna Chaxa, a salt-rich lagoon in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It’s a location that flamingos have adapted to live in over millennia. But each year, is still a struggle. November 2024.

Scientists from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have uncovered fresh geological evidence that water once flowed beneath the surface of Mars, suggesting the Red Planet may have stayed habitable ...

Underneath the parched sands of Atacama is a massive, diverse group of bacteria and a previously undetected biosphere, according to a new study. Reading time 2 minutes The Atacama Desert—an arid, ...

For decades, scientists have puzzled over why Earth stayed warm and alive while Mars turned cold and dry. Both planets began with similar ingredients—rocky surfaces, carbon, water, and sunlight—but ...

"A very remarkable series of events took place during the late Miocene between 5.96 and 5.33 million years ago." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

A satellite photo from July shows intricate snowy stripes painted across the Atacama Desert in Chile. The icy weather temporarily put the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) ...

D eserts are too quickly dismissed as hostile environments. Hot, dry, and uninviting, it's often difficult to imagine how a desert could sustain any kind of life. And yet, these drylands rank among ...

Earth’s driest ecosystems are a study in extremes: They can be blazingly hot stretches of sand like the Sahara Desert or shatteringly cold expanses of ice such as those in Greenland and Antarctica.

Where there’s a tree, there’s usually a forest. But not always. A biologist describes some of the loneliest trees on planet Earth. When we think about isolation in nature, we usually picture islands ...