A new study co-led by the Smithsonian and the University of Arizona offers the most detailed glimpse yet of how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years. In a paper ...

Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years. Here’s the surprising place we stand now. An effort to understand Earth’s past climates uncovered a history of wild ...

An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts ...

This story was updated on November 12, 2024, to correct the graph showing temperature and CO 2 over time. The original version plotted the fifth percentile values of both instead of the 50th ...

How 485 million years of Earth’s temperature history reveals climate tipping points and extinction risks. At 13.9 degrees, there is much scope for Earth’s surface to get a lot warmer, ...

The Earth today is like an icehouse, with ice sheets at both poles and comparatively lower carbon dioxide concentrations, but this has been rare rather than commonplace through the planet's history.

The paper, titled “A 485-million-year history of Earth's surface temperature,” was published Thursday in the journal Science and co-led by researchers at the Smithsonian and University of Arizona. It ...

More information: Yuntao Bao et al, Climate simulations and ice core data highlight the Holocene conundrum over tropical mountains, Communications Earth & Environment (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s43247 ...

At the end of the Ordovician (about 440 million years ago), temperatures plunged by 7° C in just a few million years, launching a brief ice age [1] At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, ...

A new record-high daily global average temperature was reached on July 22, at 30.8 degrees. Every month since July 2023, except for July 2024, was above the 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 C) threshold.