New study reveals that the Earth's mantle was not as hot when Pangaea began to break apart millions of years ago.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The discovery, made just off the coast of Vancouver Island in the Pacific Ocean, shows that a section of the oceanic crust is slowly breaking apart beneath the North American Plate. Using seismic data ...

Teeming with heat-loving microbes, samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...