All around the world, from the Red Sea to the deep ocean ridges of the Atlantic, lurk more than a dozen geological misfits.

New experiments have re-created the genesis of Earth’s first continents. By putting the squeeze on water and oceanic rocks under intense heat, researchers produced material that closely resembles the ...

Earth’s mantle has cooled by 6–11 °C every 100 million years since the Archaean, 2.5 billion years ago. In more recent times, the surface heat loss that led to this temperature drop may have been ...

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 ...

It turns out that continental breakups are just as messy as human ones, with the events leaving fragments scattered far from home ...

The map of Earth looks settled at first glance. Continents feel fixed, named, and counted. Yet over the past few decades, ...

From islands to estuaries, everything we see is a thin layer of ever-evolving dirt called the Earth's crust. What you view on a daily basis is relatively young -- approximately 600 million years old; ...

Image: Tiny crystals called zircons are used to date oceanic crust. A newly developed method that detects tiny bits of zircon in rock reliably predicts the age of ocean crust more than 99 percent of ...