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 ...
Deep beneath our feet, approximately 2,890 kilometers underground, lies one of Earth's most mysterious regions. The boundary ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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How the tectonic plates were formed

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and ...
The biggest jigsaw puzzle in the solar system has a split personality: The number and sizes of Earth's tectonic plates can flip, according to a new study. Today, the pieces of Earth's broken shell are ...
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, ...
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Earth's hot, gooey center and its cold, hard outer shell are both responsible for the creeping ...
If Yale researcher Jun Korenaga is correct, then habitable planets may be rarer than previously thought. According to a recently published paper, the ability of Earthlike planets to self-regulate ...
A mysterious layer lies beneath Earth's massive tectonic plates. Sandwiched between two rock layers — the rigid lithosphere and the more pliable asthenosphere— this thin boundary is like the jelly in ...