The ancient history of Earth has always been hard to read. Most of the planet’s earliest crust has been lost, buried, or melted by geologic processes over billions of years.

The Afar junction is the point at which the Arabian, Nubian, and Somalian plates meet, each departing in their own directions to leave a widening gap under the Afar Triangle. Eventually, the crust ...

Tiny glass beads formed in the fires of explosive volcanic eruptions on the moon, and brought back to Earth by Apollo 17, ...

Earth’s moving interior generates our planet’s magnetic field, an invisible shield that helps protect us and our atmosphere from harmful energy coming from space.

Earth’s interior can be divided into several layers: the crust, the mantle, the liquid outer core, and the solid inner core at the center. Many scientists have studied how the inner core moves ...

Using earthquake data, Vidale and his colleagues have been working for years to unveil the mysteries of the inner core. In 2022, they published a paper describing what appeared to be a link between a ...

Journey to the Center of the Earth Our planet’s inner core is encased within a liquid outer core, where it remains gravitationally anchored close to 3,000 miles below the Earth’s surface. Diagram ...

Let's say we want to build a model of the sun and Earth alone. Earth has a radius of about 6,371 kilometers (3,959 miles), but let's represent this with a marble 1 centimeter in diameter.

At the same time, however, these volcanoes could not have been active for 165 million years—not even the ocean plate they burst from is that old. A cutaway section shows the Earth's interior.

Researchers created a seismic map of Earth's interior beneath the southeastern Pacific Ocean and discovered an ancient slab of oceanic crust that appears to be stuck midway through the mantle.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Scientists have uncovered evidence of a long-lost underwater collision that occurred over 100 million years ago, dramatically altering the landscape of Earth’s deep interior. This ...

University of Maryland scientists uncovered evidence of an ancient seafloor that sank deep into Earth during the age of dinosaurs, challenging existing theories about Earth's interior structure ...