Image: Tiny crystals called zircons are used to date oceanic crust. A newly developed method that detects tiny bits of zircon in rock reliably predicts the age of ocean crust more than 99 percent of ...

An ancient slab of Earth's crust buried deep beneath the Midwest is sucking huge swatches of present-day's North American crust down into the mantle, researchers say. The slab's pull has created giant ...

When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the ...

Teeming with heat-loving microbes, samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

This study is led by Dr. Jian Lin (Southern University of Science and Technology) and Dr. Fan Zhang (South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences). “Water is crucial to ...

All around the world, from the Red Sea to the deep ocean ridges of the Atlantic, lurk more than a dozen geological misfits. These scraps of continental crust are found in the middle of oceans, ...

The formation and composition of oceanic crust remain central yet unresolved questions in plate tectonics. While seismic data suggest a globally uniform crustal thickness (~6 km), petrological ...