Seismic mapping of North America has revealed that an ancient slab of crust buried beneath the Midwest is causing the crust ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The findings could reveal how mountains and basins are built on planets like Venus or Mars, where ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Like a mosquito tunneling into the skin to get at the rich feast within, geologists poked a long, narrow drill into Earth's crust ...

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 ...

Learn more about how Earth’s crust unzipped beneath the Atlantic Ocean, creating a giant underwater canyon.

The Earth's mantle might not always move along in lockstep with the overlying tectonic crust—as set out in science textbooks for decades—but may instead behave differently. This is the conclusion of ...

A new study from a University of Chicago scientist suggests there may be a layer of surprisingly fluid rock ringing the Earth, at the very bottom of the upper mantle. The finding was made by measuring ...

Researchers created a seismic map of Earth's interior beneath the southeastern Pacific Ocean and discovered an ancient slab of oceanic crust that appears to be stuck midway through the mantle. When ...