Early in Earth’s history, the heat left over from the collision that formed the Moon left its surface an ocean of magma. As it cooled, its crust was frequently shattered by massive impacts that ...

Hell, or something like it, may be a little closer than we thought. As a new study published in Nature Geoscience reveals, geologists at Cornell and the University of Texas have discovered a “hidden” ...

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 discovery that changes ...

Creative destruction: a thinner ocean plate sides under a continental plate, melting and recycling the ocean crust into the Earth’s interior and birthing volcanoes in this illustration of subduction, ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

At subduction zones, where one plate bends deep beneath another, the sinking plate can carry more than an ocean's worth of water into the mantle over billions of years. A new subduction zone south of ...