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 ...

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 ...

Africa’s Turkana Rift Zone, a hotbed of hominin fossils, is caught in the act of “necking," a critical transition toward ...

Scientists have uncovered evidence of Mauritia, a submerged microcontinent in the Indian Ocean, potentially a fragment of ...

Bermuda’s volcanic rocks may reveal a hidden water-rich layer deep inside Earth, reshaping ideas about mantle structure and ...

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.

Eclogitic diamonds formed in Earth's mantle originate from oceanic crust, rather than marine sediments as commonly thought, according to a new study. Eclogitic diamonds formed in Earth's mantle ...

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.