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 ...

Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have originated from a huge impact billions of years ...

Remember back in fourth grade when your mind was blown that the continents and oceans are all actually moving, very slowly, and that they used to be in different forms? The theory of plate tectonics ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The crust of volcanically active Venus could be churning with ...

A study proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle. The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of ...

Continental drift -- Historic tectonics: an overview -- Convection currents -- Crustal plates -- Seafloor spreading -- Subduction zones -- Mountain building -- The rock cycle -- Tectonics and life -- ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...