Everything has its pecking order, and geology is no exception. The cocks of the rocks are the big, swaggering periods of the past that fill books, television programmes and natural-history museums.

Every other Friday, the Outside/In team answers a listener question about the natural world. This week’s question comes from Emily in Washington, DC. Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario. The answer to ...

No work on any science has yet been published in our language more exhaustive of facts, more clear in statement, or more philosophical in general character and arrangement, than Dana’s “ Mineralogy,” ...

A new international study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters reveals that the boundaries between geological epochs and periods, even though randomly distributed, follow a hidden, ...

To interpret what we see today both on land and at the seabed, we need to understand how the landscape was different in the past. When we say "past," we mean on a geologic timeframe—specifically, ...

DRAW two lines on your map, the upper one running from the mouth of the St. Lawrence westward nearly to St. Paul on the Mississippi, and the lower one from the neighborhood of St. John’s in ...