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 ...

New research deepens the understanding of Earth's crust by testing and ultimately eliminating one popular hypothesis about why continental crust is lower in iron and more oxidized compared to oceanic ...

When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

Like a moth in a cocoon, the metamorphosis of Earth's crust from molten goop to solid land is hidden from view, leaving scientists to guess at how the eons-long process unfolds. Using nearly four ...

One of the main achievements in the Earth science is the development of plate tectonics theory in the 20 th century. It successfully explains the generation and extinction of oceanic plate from ...

An ancient slab of Earth's crust buried deep beneath the Midwest is sucking huge swatches of present-day's North American crust down into the mantle, researchers say. The slab's pull has created giant ...

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 ...

A new ocean could form in the distant future after a split continues to form in Africa, according to researchers. "This is the only place on Earth where you can study how a continental rift becomes an ...

Continents are part of what makes Earth uniquely habitable for life among the planets of the solar system, yet surprisingly little is understood about what gave rise to these huge pieces of the planet ...