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 ...

Earth's middle layer is chunky, like peanuts in a sea of caramel. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In Geology 101, Earth's ...

A long-lost oceanic plate is diving deep into the mantle, dragging down the crust above, researchers say. However, the plate is also tearing apart below the Zagros Mountains in Iraq as it plunges ...

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 King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor. Its formation was long thought to be the result of simple stretching of ...

The oceanic crust is generated at mid-ocean ridges through the ascent, storage and extraction of mantle-derived melts. As primitive magma ascends, it forms vertically extensive crystal mush zones in ...

Earth is often imagined as a stable world, ancient, solid, and mostly unchanging beneath the surface. In reality, the planet ...

Oman's mountains reveal ancient ocean floor rocks. Geologists study these formations, usually deep underwater. This unique site allows exploration of oceanic crust and mantle processes which are ...

The Sentry, an autonomous undersea vehicle, was used to map the magnetic stripes in Pito Deep, a large chasm in the Pacific Ocean that provides a cross-section of samples of lower oceanic crust.

In Geology 101, Earth's interior is divided into neat layers, like a sugar-coated jawbreaker. But it turns out that parts of the planet's middle layer might be more like peanuts in a sea of caramel.