The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

The crust of volcanically active Venus could be churning with convection currents just like the Earth's mantle. This is the conclusion of researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis, who ...

Seismic waves from earthquakes have always offered a window into Earth’s hidden interior. For decades, researchers believed they had a firm grasp on how these waves revealed the rocky mantle’s secrets ...

A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of ...

Plate tectonics describes the movement and interaction of tectonic plates on Earth's surface. This movement is driven by the very slow creeping motion of Earth's mantle, called convection, which carry ...

On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be ...

FILE - A girl looks at the moon through a telescope in Caracas, Venezuela, on Sunday, May 15, 2022. The best day to spot five planets, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars, lined up in the night ...

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. The molten layer is located about 100 ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...