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American whalers recorded voyages in Australian rock art, study reveals Text chiseled into boulders more than 150 years ago is the earliest archaeological evidence of a thriving 19th-century American whaling industry found in northwestern Australia. Homesick sailors on 19th-century American whaling ships commemorated their remarkable circumnavigations of the globe by recording their voyages into rocks on remote islands in northwestern Australia, report archaeologists. Engravings created by whalemen on two vessels—Connecticut, in 1842, and Delta, in 1849—have been found amid Aboriginal rock art on the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, nearly 1,000 miles north of Perth. The discovery is reported in...

Using the oldest fossil micrometeorites -- space dust -- ever found, Monash University-led research has made a surprising discovery about the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago. The findings of a new study published today in the journal Nature -- led by Dr Andrew Tomkins and a team from the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash, along with scientists from the Australian Synchrotron and Imperial College, London -- challenge the accepted view that Earth's ancient atmosphere was oxygen-poor. The findings indicate instead that the ancient Earth's upper atmosphere contained about the same amount of oxygen as...