Deep below Earth's surface lie two gigantic structures with mysterious origins. Now, seismologists have found new clues about their composition that could upend our understanding of the whole planet's ...

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

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 ...

Scientists discovered how Earth recycles continents deep underground, shaping the unusual rocks found in ancient mountain ...

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 ...

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 ...

Continent-size islands deep inside Earth's mantle could be more than a billion years old, a new study finds. Known as large low-seismic-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), these blobs are both hotter and ...

A new model suggests “mantle rain” ensures we will always have a surface ocean Theo Nicitopoulos, Hakai The Earth’s oceans have risen and fallen over the millennia. But they have, on average, been ...

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 ...

Unsustainable irrigation and drought have emptied nearly all of the Aral Sea’s water since the 1960s, causing changes extending all the way down to Earth’s upper mantle, the layer beneath the planet’s ...

Earthquakes that jiggle Earth's middle layer may be more widespread than scientists thought. A new map of these mysterious deep earthquakes shows that they occur all around the world and that they may ...

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 ...