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.

There are a few exceptions, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a burst of sudden warming about 55 million years ago, but few events that old are nearly as well understood. Now, researchers have used a combination of proxy records and climate models to reconstruct the Earth's climate for the last half-billion years,

We live in a rapidly warming world. Immense volumes of human-generated greenhouse gases are nudging Earth’s climate to a warmer and warmer state, further changing our planet as sea levels rise, living things shift how they live,

A recent study confirms that Earth's temperature is strongly correlated with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

By Bobby Bascomb From the first birds and fish to pine trees, dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and humans, most life on Earth has evolved and flourished over the last roughly 500 million years. A new study documents how the Earth’s temperature changed in that time frame — carbon dioxide has been a driving cause of historic temperature increases.

If you were to compare Earth today with the planet 485 million years ago, when would it be warmer? A new research study charting temperatures over nearly half a million years reveals the surprising answer.