All around the world, from the Red Sea to the deep ocean ridges of the Atlantic, lurk more than a dozen geological misfits.

Image: Tiny crystals called zircons are used to date oceanic crust. A newly developed method that detects tiny bits of zircon in rock reliably predicts the age of ocean crust more than 99 percent of ...

Beneath the rolling surface of the North Atlantic, the seafloor drops into a chasm so vast it rivals, and may even exceed, ...

It turns out that continental breakups are just as messy as human ones, with the events leaving fragments scattered far from home ...

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

Teeming with heat-loving microbes, samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion ...

The map of Earth looks settled at first glance. Continents feel fixed, named, and counted. Yet over the past few decades, ...

Map of the Earth showing tectonic plates. Early Earth likely had no plate tectonics, but a solid outer crust with no tectonic activity covered the entire planet. After being broken up by convection ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...