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 ...

Far below your feet, nearly 1,800 miles beneath oceans and continents, Earth carries two massive scars from its violent youth. They are so large they rival continents in size, yet no human will ever ...

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 ...

Millions of years ago, a fiery plume rising from Earth’s mantle reshaped continents, closing ancient seas and lifting land that would forever change life on our planet. This upheaval forged a bridge ...

Earth’s deep interior still shapes the world above your feet. Water trapped far below the surface helps control how rocks move, melt, and recycle through the mantle. Some of that water carries a ...

If this continues to develop, this rift could grow into a new tectonic plate boundary—splitting the African continent in half ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. An international team of researchers investigated how Earth’s ...

The Earth’s oceans have risen and fallen over the millennia. But they have, on average, been relatively stable over billions of years. The balance of the deep water cycle—the exchange of water between ...

Seismic waves traveling through Earth's interior often propagate at different speeds depending on their direction, a ...

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 ...