A typical desk globe is designed to be a geometric sphere and to rotate smoothly when you spin it. Our actual planet is far less perfect — in both shape and in rotation. Earth is not a perfect sphere.

The woman I was talking to seemed very sure of her facts, but they didn’t add up to me. She declared that the axis of the Earth had shifted 6 degrees, and somehow it was the fault of ...

Spring, summer, fall, and winter — the seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time every year. It’s easy to take this cycle for granted here on Earth, but not every planet has a ...

Any planet, in our own solar system or beyond, is shaped by a certain set of influences: the whirlwind circumstances of its formation, the contents of its deep interiors, other natural phenomena that ...

New NASA-funded research provides evidence that the spin axis of Earth’s moon shifted by about five degrees roughly three billion years ago. The evidence of this motion is recorded in the distribution ...