Far beneath the fields and towns of the American Midwest, the Earth's crust is doing something unexpected. It's dripping.That ...

New research suggests that Earth's first crust, formed over 4.5 billion years ago, already carried the chemical traits we associate with modern continents. This means the telltale fingerprints of ...

Researchers have discovered cratonic thinning occurring beneath North America, driven by the remnants of the Farallon Plate.

The Earth has a layered structure made up of the core, the mantle and the crust. Different elements are present in different parts of the Earth’s structure. The crust is made from enormous ...

The Earth is made of different layers: the core, mantle and crust. Plate tectonic theory shows that the crust of the Earth is split into plates (pieces of the Earth’s crust). The movement of ...

Beneath the American Midwest, on the continent of North America, the underside of Earth's crust is dripping into the ...

It is unlikely that the Earth's mantle — the layer beneath the crust and above the core — was completely homogeneous when it initially formed. Over time, cooling-induced convection as well as ...

The mantle is incredibly difficult to study because it’s so deeply buried beneath the Earth’s crust, or outer skin. Now, scientists have drilled a 1,268m-deep core that reaches down into this ...

Others have suggested that the blobs are huge chunks of oceanic crust that were pushed into the mantle when one tectonic plate slipped under another — a process known as subduction. The crust ...