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 ...

Geoscientists are using ancient chert rocks from the Pacific's Shatsky Rise to understand Earth's thermal history. Oxygen isotopes within these silica-rich rocks act as tiny thermometers, revealing ...

An ancient slab of Earth's crust buried deep beneath the Midwest is sucking huge swatches of present-day's North American crust down into the mantle, researchers say. The slab's pull has created giant ...

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 ...

Record earthquake activity off the coast of Vancouver Island hints at the birth of new oceanic crust. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

This study is led by Dr. Jian Lin (Southern University of Science and Technology) and Dr. Fan Zhang (South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences). “Water is crucial to ...

The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor. Its formation was long thought to be the result of simple stretching of ...

The formation and composition of oceanic crust remain central yet unresolved questions in plate tectonics. While seismic data suggest a globally uniform crustal thickness (~6 km), petrological ...