China is set to venture where humanity has scarcely been before: beneath the Earth's crust, into its mantle. To achieve this ...

The ancient crust of Australia is crucial for understanding the early Earth, because it tells us about how the continental crust formed and evolved. Continental crust forms the foundation of ...

We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

Continental and oceanic plates all fit together to form the outer crust of the planet. Eight major plates are named on the diagram below. Heat from the core makes magma in the mantle rise towards ...

Cratons owe their longevity to their roots, or keels, Foster says. Cratons are much thicker than surrounding continental crust, with keels that can extend hundreds of kilometers down into the mantle.

Beneath the central and southern Sierra Nevada, seismic signals confirmed a slow-motion detachment of deep crust, matching theories of global-scale continental evolution over geologic time.

New crust is continually being pushed away from divergent boundaries (where sea-floor spreading occurs), increasing Earth's surface. But the Earth isn't getting any bigger. What happens ...