Scientists have long held the belief that the fracturing of the Earth's brittle outer shell into faults along the deep ocean's mountainous landscape occurs only during long periods when no magma has ...

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 ...

One of the Earth's best-ever baby pictures reveals how crust forms at the biggest volcanic feature on the planet. The detailed look at molten magma beneath a mid-ocean ridge, one of the giant undersea ...

At mid-ocean ridges, the directions in which plates spread and the underlying mantle flows were thought to broadly align. A synthesis of results from ridges that spread at a variety of rates reveals ...

The earthquake distribution on ultra-slow mid-ocean ridges differs fundamentally from other spreading zones. Water circulating at a depth of up to 15 kilometers leads to the formation of rock that ...

Seafloor lava rubble stores far more carbon than solid rock, revealing a long-overlooked carbon sink shaping Earth’s climate over time.

Some of the highest quality images ever taken of the Earth's lower crust reveal that the upper and lower crust form in two distinctly different ways. A team led by researchers from Columbia University ...