When most of us think about what shaped our planet, we probably picture volcanoes, earthquakes, and huge continents slowly drifting apart (or back together again) over millions or billions of years.

Several times since the age of dinosaurs, the solid part of our planet has rolled over, drowning some continents and lifting ...

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 ...

The new map highlights six regions that had been poorly sampled by PKP precursor studies and now appear to be promising targets for closer investigation. They include areas beneath high-latitude ...

As early as 2024, scientists from the US and China discovered that the Earth’s core had slowed down and even stopped moving in relation to the Earth’s crust. But until now, the general public—that’s ...

The crust under Italy is "unzipping" and falling away into the mantle, new research finds. This process is the driver of much of the seismic activity in the Apennine Mountains, the long chain of peaks ...

Asteroids and planetesimals regularly bombarded Earth between about 4.6 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, during the Hadean and Archean eons. Because few rocks today are more than 4 billion years old ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don’t agree on how they formed. “The continents started appearing around ...

A new study suggests that a giant section of lower crust beneath Italy is slowly peeling away and sinking into the mantle. Scientists say this “unzipping” could explain much of the earthquake activity ...

When the island of Santorini was rattled by thousands of small earthquakes earlier this year, many people were left mystified about the source of the tremors. The shaking lasted more than a month and ...