Plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought—and may be a big ...

Earth's continents are slowly moving across the planet's surface due to plate tectonics, culminating in regions of crustal ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of ...

Caltech researchers have developed a new method to study Earth's structure deep beneath the surface, at the boundary between ...

Caltech researchers introduce a new seismic technology called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) to study earthquakes and ...

In a historic milestone for marine and geological sciences, China officially commissioned the Meng Xiang, the nation’s first ...

New crust forms at midocean ridges, where gaps between separating plates create space for magma from the mantle to rise. In a geologic balancing act, dense oceanic crust is destroyed at subduction ...

Their discovery changes our perception of underwater life. At depths of over 8,200 feet (2,500 meters), scientists have uncovered a universe teeming with animal life beneath the oceanic crust. These ...

When two oceanic plates converge ... Hot magma from Earth’s mantle wells up at these ridges, forming new ocean crust and shoving the plates apart. Underwater mountains and volcanoes can rise ...

By contrast, geophysical observations, in particular from seismology, indicate that some subducted oceanic plates, known as slabs, sink all the way into the lower mantle (Fig. 1). This seems to ...