The layers of Earth provide geologists and geophysicists clues to how Earth formed, the layers that make up other planetary bodies, the source of Earth's resources, and much more. Modern advances have ...

Putting a new spin on an old technique, a research professor of earth and planetary sciences has revolutionized scientists' understanding of heat transport in the Earth's crust, the outermost solid ...

Life needs more than water alone. Recent discoveries suggest that plate tectonics has played a critical role in nourishing life on Earth. The findings carry major consequences for the search for life ...

The Earth’s crust is constantly changing. It’s currently made of many huge rock slabs called tectonic plates—seven major ones along with many more smaller plates—that fit together like puzzle pieces ...

A large chunk of the Earth's crust is missing but scientists have now discovered where it is located. The world is constantly ...

How do you make half the mass of two continents disappear? To answer that question, you first need to discover that it's missing. That's what a trio of University of Chicago geoscientists and their ...

The emergence of plate tectonics is arguably Earth’s defining moment, the authors of a new Nature paper write. Out of all the planets we’ve looked at carefully, Earth is the only one that has a hard ...

China has unveiled its first ocean drilling vessel, the Mengxiang, which is designed to carry out an unprecedented mission: drilling through the Earth’s crust. If successful, this will mark humanity’s ...