Picture the Earth’s crust and you most probably think of dense, dry rock. You don’t imagine a goey, honey-like substance trickling down into the planet’s deep underbelly. And yet, new research has ...

Like a moth in a cocoon, the metamorphosis of Earth's crust from molten goop to solid land is hidden from view, leaving scientists to guess at how the eons-long process unfolds. Using nearly four ...

Beneath the American Midwest, on the continent of North America, the underside of Earth's crust is dripping into the planetary interior. There, blobs of molten rock are coalescing in the upper mantle ...

Learn more about how Earth’s crust unzipped beneath the Atlantic Ocean, creating a giant underwater canyon.

Seismic mapping of North America has revealed that an ancient slab of crust buried beneath the Midwest is causing the crust above it to "drip" and suck down rocks from across the continent. When you ...

Continental clues: Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet’s history, challenging current theories about plate tectonics. Researchers have made a new ...

New research reveals that Earth’s continents owe their stability to searing heat deep in the planet’s crust. At more than 900°C, radioactive elements shifted upward, cooling and strengthening the ...

The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor.