Water may have been shaping Earth’s deep interior far earlier than many geologists thought. In rocks more than 3 billion years old from Western Australia, a research team found chemical signs that ...

Geologists studying some of the planet's oldest volcanic rocks have uncovered new evidence that water was playing a major ...

The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make ...

Major clues to the origins of our planet—and life itself—are locked inside some three billion-year-old volcanic rocks from ...

The spread of the ocean floor, as tectonic plates spread apart, is known but hard to observe. Scientists have now documented ...

Geologists studying some of the planet’s oldest volcanic rocks have uncovered new evidence that water was playing a major ...

Earlier study of the region had shown that the spreading in the area occurs at an average rate of a bit over 60 millimeters a ...

The first-known direct observations of a seafloor spreading event at a mid-ocean ridge in the Indian Ocean are presented in ...

At the boundaries between tectonic plates, narrow rifts can form as Earth's crust slowly pulls apart. But how, exactly, does this rifting happen? Does pressure from magma rising from belowground force ...

Scientists have witnessed the birth of new oceanic crust for the first time, capturing a rare seafloor spreading event that offers fresh insights into Earth's tectonic processes.

For most of human history, the creation of new ocean floor has been something inferred rather than witnessed. Geologists ...

Most of our planet's crust is forged in a thalassic factory human eyes never see. Across 65,000 kilometers (40,400 miles) of ...