For decades, climate science has treated Earth’s shifting crust as a slow, distant backdrop to the drama of global warming.

An earthquake-generating chunk of tectonic plate has been discovered beneath Northern California. It’s attached to the bottom of the North American plate like gum stuck to a shoe. Using abundant, tiny ...

Spain and Portugal are taking a turn. The Iberian Peninsula sits on a boundary between two large tectonic plates that are being stressed by a variety of forces, and because of this, the peninsula is ...

For decades, the end-stage life of a subduction zone existed only in theory. Now, for the first time in geologic history, scientists are bearing witness to the Juan de Fuca Plate tearing apart and ...

Robert Krut grew up devouring books by Raymond Carver and the Beat Poets, heavily influenced by the short story writer’s sparse prose and the latters’ collective bent toward romantic fearlessness. To ...

Want to turn on, tune in, and drop out? The lava lamp is your go-to device. Hailing from the same era as the famous Timothy Leary quote, this hippy, trippy lamp, with its slowly undulating globules, ...

Earth is fortunate in having a magnetic field: it protects the planet and its life from harmful cosmic radiation. Other planets in our solar system—such as Mars—are constantly bombarded by charged ...

Geologists from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how Earth's early continents formed during the Archean time, more than 2.5 billion years ago. Their findings ...

A plume of molten rock rising from the depths of the Earth in heartbeat-like pulses is slowly tearing Africa apart—and will one day create a new ocean. This is the conclusion of an international team ...

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, drive the world’s most devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. How do these danger zones come to be? A study in Geology presents ...

Since 1980, California’s passenger car license plates have followed the same format: one number, three letters, and three numbers (think 1ABC234). But that tried-and-true combo is at the end of its ...

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 ...