The audience was stunned. Atwater was the first person to use the newly revealed secrets of the seafloor to explain a ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

From time to time, when Earth's tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new modeling study published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, R. Dietmar ...

Plate tectonics is a highly complex phenomenon that underpins almost every geological process and our understanding of Earth. Increasingly sophisticated computers and statistical approaches, including ...

The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

Robyn Williams: In Perth we have a leading geologist who came originally from Germany. His name is Klaus Regenauer-Lieb and he has just scored a cover story in the journal Nature. It's about the way ...

The solid ground that we all live on forms a thin crust around the Earth. It’s no more than 50km thick - and it’s just the upper part of the lithosphere. Below it is the upper mantle. It’s mostly ...

The diagram below shows the structure of the earth. In geography, taking a slice through a structure to see inside is called a cross section. Continental plates are usually quite thick (between 35 to ...