The tiny Juan de Fuca plate is largely responsible for the volcanoes that dot the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The plates make up Earth's outer shell, called the lithosphere. (This includes ...

For decades, geologists labeled a billion-year stretch of Earth’s history—from 1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago—as the “Boring ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled with natural fluctuations in the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Over the past century, humans have pushed CO₂ ...

What causes lava to gush from volcanoes in plumes of liquid fire or the ground to shake like the world is ending? Plate tectonics. What causes plate tectonics? Not so fast. Until now, the answer was ...

Venus is sometimes called Earth’s twin, as it is roughly the same size as Earth, occupies the orbital lane adjacent to ours, and has a problem with greenhouse gases (namely carbon dioxide) in its ...

A volcano is erupting on Iceland, and Doug arrives just as fountains of lava bring up from the depths rare materials as old as the Earth itself. Iceland is defined by its geology, and Doug explores ...

The percentage of water in arc volcanoes, which form above subduction zones, may be far more than many previous studies have calculated. This increased amount of water has broad implications for ...

A new study unlocks the science behind a key ingredient -- namely oxygen -- in some of the world's most violent volcanoes. The research offers a new model for understanding the oxidation state of arc ...

A huge volcano hundreds of feet beneath the ocean's surface has started erupting next to the deepest point on Earth. The Ahyi Seamount—a large submarine volcano—lies 449 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean ...