To be considered active, a volcano must have erupted at some point during the Holocene, but dormant and extinct are a little harder to define.

Deposits in Morocco associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction, 201.6 million years ago. Red sediments in many locations around the world contain Triassic-era fossils. The white band on top ...

Massive volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula have long been proposed as an alternative cause for the demise of the dinosaurs. This phase of active volcanism took place in a period just before ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Volcanoes are responsible for some of the greatest ...

A volcano that lies close to the border between Iran and Pakistan may be nearing an eruption again for the first time in more than 700,000 years, a study has suggested. Scientists say that the Taftan ...

Farther back in our planet’s history, volcanic eruptions, rapid climate change, and plummeting oxygen levels have caused at least four additional mass extinctions, with smaller pulses of biodiversity ...

The mass extinction that wiped out nearly all life on Earth just before the dinosaurs evolved may have been caused by a global temperature drop rather than a rapidly warming climate. The End Triassic ...

For decades, scientists have debated what wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The usual suspects? A massive asteroid or powerful volcanic eruptions. But now, researchers from Dartmouth ...

Since the beginning of time, Earth has created life and then wiped out most of it in catastrophic, ultra-destructive moments.

Scientists say a mysterious type of iron-rich magma entombed within long dormant volcanoes is likely packed with the in-demand elementsAccording to a new study, extinct volcanoes could be a “rich” ...

A rhesus monkey scampered toward them, but Blair Schoene and Kyle Samperton GS ’15 just shooed it away. They were too excited by a 15-centimeter-tall ash bed containing an uncommonly large amount of ...

The Palisades cliffs west of New York City rear up from the Hudson River like the spine of some ancient beast—and that impression is not far off. Their basalt backbone is a remnant of an immense lava ...