Tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.

While the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.

This is the hundred-year tale of how an unlikely bunch of bottom-dwelling marine critters helped reveal that ocean basins are basically reincarnated every few hundred million years.

Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.

Coral reefs are the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet and the lifeblood of a thriving ocean. Yet without action, 90 percent of coral reefs could die by 2050. Fortunately, reef guardian Theresa Fyffe has a plan. Learn how her team...

Life in Antarctica's ocean has followed a completely different evolutionary path from other ocean life because of how cold and isolated the ocean is.

It's time for our periodic update of good news from Angus Hervey, founder of Fix the News, an independent publication that reports stories of global progress. In a quick talk, he shares three major updates of recent human progress on...

An oblate spheroid is a special case of an ellipsoid where two of the semi-principal axes are the same size.

Denizens of the Deep

Earth didn't have water when it formed, but it does now! How did it get wet?

Why Does Earth Have Deserts? For the same reason it has Rainforests: Hadley Cells!!!

In this captivating video narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, viewers are taken on a journey through the history of the universe, from its explosive beginnings to the evolution of life on Earth. Through a mix of science and...

Today's oceans are full of fish with fins that couldn't evolve into limbs like ours. So, who are our ancestors and where did they go?

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.

A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

Around 30 million years ago, a new group of predators began to push nautiloids from their former global range into a single remaining refuge. But who were these predators?

In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the...

How did seahorses — one of the ocean’s worst swimmers — spread around the globe? And where did they come from in the first place?

Ocean currents are our planet’s circulatory system, and they keep everything from ecosystems to the climate healthy. But we’re changing Earth in ways that threaten to disrupt and even break critical ocean currents like the planet-wide...

There’s been a lot of talk on YouTube lately about ocean plastic pollution and #TeamSeas. But there hasn’t been enough talk about the *ridiculously unthinkable scale of the ocean plastic pollution problem* or how it intersects with other...

Hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones are Earth’s most powerful storms, capable of unleashing destruction and death on coastal areas worldwide. As climate change warms Earth’s oceans, we face more risk of storms rapidly...

You'd think that the Northern and Southern Hemispheres would be basically symmetrical -- that since our planet is a ball, the climate, temperature, and weather patterns would be the same on top as on the bottom. But there are some...

Lots of geological forces need to come together for continents to form, but they all require one ingredient: water.

A volcanic eruption and series of earthquakes in 2005 were important not because they did a great deal of damage to humans, but because they’re geologic evidence of where Earth’s next ocean will most likely pop up.