An ancient slab of Earth's crust buried deep beneath the Midwest is sucking huge swatches of present-day's North American crust down into the mantle, researchers say. The slab's pull has created giant ...
Picture the Earth’s crust and you most probably think of dense, dry rock. You don’t imagine a goey, honey-like substance trickling down into the planet’s deep underbelly. And yet, new research has ...
Scientists discovered Hawaii’s deep mantle plume is splitting, which may create two future volcanic island chains.
In 1981, scientists discovered one of the thinnest portions of the Earth’s crust — a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) thick, earthquake-prone spot under the Atlantic Ocean where the American and African ...
Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Like a mosquito tunneling into the skin to get at the rich feast within, geologists poked a long, narrow drill into Earth's crust ...
New study reveals that Earth's inner core is undergoing unexpected structural changes, challenging long-held assumptions about its solidity.
Just when things couldn't get any crazier in the US, scientists have discovered that the underside of the Earth's crust is dripping molten lava inside the planet. The hot lava is thought to be ...
What is the chemical composition of the Earth’s interior? Because it is impossible to drill more than about ten kilometres deep into the Earth, volcanic rocks formed by melting Earth’s deep interior ...
A beautiful blue flaw in a gem-quality diamond from Botswana is actually a tiny fragment of Earth’s deep interior—and it suggests our planet’s mantle contains oceans’ worth of water. The flaw, ...
The Earth's mantle might not always move along in lockstep with the overlying tectonic crust—as set out in science textbooks for decades—but may instead behave differently. This is the conclusion of ...
When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the ...
Geoscientists have made an unprecedented achievement on their 60-year quest to know more about Earth's mysterious depths. Pieces of Earth’s rocky mantle were collected by a drilling vessel called the ...