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For most of human history, the atmosphere was something felt rather than measured. People knew that air moved, pushed against sails and filled the lungs, but its physical weight was harder to demonstrate.

A device built to track enemy submarines during the Second World War went on to become one of the most important tools in Earth science. The fluxgate magnetometer, first developed to detect small disturbances in the planet's magnetic field caused by metal hulls beneath the ocean surface, was later adapted by scientists to study the seafloor itself.

Earth's core holds far more gold than anyone can reach. More than 99.999 per cent of the planet's stores of gold and other precious metals lie buried under 3,000 kilometres of solid rock, locked away within the metallic core and far beyond the reach of humankind.

The Sun may appear to us on Earth as a glowing ball of plasma, but its surface is far more active and turbulent than it looks, which has been proven time and again through research. According to a latest report by Nature, observations from the world's largest solar telescope have now provided an incredibly detailed view of the Sun's surface, showing tiny swirling structures that could help scientists understand how energy and magnetic fields flow through the solar atmosphere.

Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, only slightly larger than Earth's Moon, but what lies beneath its battered surface is anything but small. Its metallic core stretches out to nearly 85 per cent of the planet's total radius, leaving behind a rocky shell so thin it barely qualifies as a shell at all.

Around 540 million years ago, the biological landscape of Earth went through a huge transformation called the Cambrian explosion. During this era, the ancestors of most modern animal groups began to appear, depicting a massive surge in biodiversity.

Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke left something deeply personal on the Moon in 1972: a photograph of his wife and two sons. On the back, he wrote a short message identifying the family as being "from Planet Earth." Duke was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 16, which launched from Florida on April 16, 1972.

On January 10, 1946, a team of military and civilian personnel at Camp Evans, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, aimed a modified radar system at the rising Moon and transmitted high-powered radio pulses toward its surface. About 2.5 seconds later, the oscilloscope registered a faint radio echo that had travelled to the Moon and back to Earth.

In October 1971, physicists carried four caesium-beam atomic clocks aboard commercial airline flights and flew them around the world. When the clocks returned to Washington, they no longer matched identical reference clocks that had remained on the ground.

Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for roughly 180 million years, filling nearly every ecological role available to them. Yet one gap in their story has puzzled scientists for decades: there were no small ones.