Learn about how volcanoes are formed and the ways they erupt Chiara Maria Petrone, Roberto Scandone, and Alex Whittaker On ...

New research from HKU geologists suggests that Earth's first continents were born not from plate tectonics, but from deep ...

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, drive the world’s most devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. How do these danger zones come to be? A study in Geology presents ...

Scientists found new evidence that Earth’s crust is peeling underneath the Sierra Nevada in California. The process might be how the continents formed, they say.

Deep beneath Earth’s surface, researchers have discovered an ancient seafloor buried for millions of years. This unexpected ...

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life.

Magnetic data suggest Seattle's fault line formed 55 million years ago, when the southern half of a subducting chain of volcanic islands piled onto the continent and tore apart from the northern half.

Oceanic crust, made of basaltic rock and rich in magnetite, is created at divergent plate boundaries, where the mantle is constantly coughing up new magma. As the magma rises, cools and gets pushed ...

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 ...

The rocks in this oceanic crust have water locked in their minerals. As a result, Shim said, it's possible that water exists in the core-mantle boundary and can drive chemical reactions down there.

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 ...

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 ...