In the scorching deserts of East Africa, the ground is slowly tearing itself apart — a slow-motion, geological drama. Over millions of years, the African continent will cleave in two, and scientists ...

Rock samples from northeastern Canada retain chemical signals that help explain what Earth's crust was like more than 4 billion years ago.

Scientists have recently documented that oxygen is disappearing from seawater circulating through deep oceanic crust, a significant first step in understanding the way life in the "deep biosphere ...

Where the Earth’s core meets the mantle, there are two giant regions that have baffled geologists for fifty years. A new piece of the puzzle has now emerged with the discovery that they have different ...

These new results indeed show that the presence of subducted oceanic crust can explain the magnitude of the reduction of shear velocity below a depth of 660 km, as observed beneath North America.

The Earth is covered by two kinds of crust — continental and oceanic. The thinner oceanic crust is normally a little more than four miles thick, while the thicker continental crust is often as much as ...

(Phys.org)—Debate over how and where oceanic island chains, like Hawaii, form, is at an end according to an academic from The Australian National University.

The subduction-dominant Archean oceanic crust (ophiolites) was characterized by accretionary cycle plate tectonics, whereas for those of Proterozoic and Phanerozoic ages, a combination of both ...

The Earth’s mantle acts like a giant churn, circulating cool oceanic crust downward toward the core, where it heats up into a goopy solid and then rises again—a process that powers everything ...

A dense crystalline "rain" falling into Earth's mantle could explain how a mysterious seismic boundary forms beneath the crust, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The ...

Daulon Continental crust is thicker than oceanic crust. When continents collide, they buckle upwards and sideways to form mountain ranges: the Himalayas, for example.