Professor Yao Huajian's research group from the School of Earth and Space Sciences of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), in cooperation with Dr. Piero Poli from Grenoble-Alpes ...

The natural structure of the rigid oceanic crust that forms a shell around Earth contains cracks and faults. These fissures are hydrothermal pathways for heat, water, and chemical solutions to move ...

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 ...

In 1981, scientists discovered one of the thinnest portions of the Earth’s crust — a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) thick, earthquake-prone spot under the Atlantic Ocean where the American and African ...

An international research team has discovered that a subduction zone's age affects the ability for it to recycle water between the Earth's surface and its inner layers. The more mature the subduction ...

The peeling away of Earth's crust beneath Italy may explain a lot of the seismic activity in the mountains that run along the spine of the country.

Scientists witness birth of new oceanic crust for the first time, capturing rare underwater tectonic event (image: Royer et al., Nature, 2026) For the first time in scientific history, researchers ...

Most of our planet's crust is forged in a thalassic factory human eyes never see. Across 65,000 kilometers (40,400 miles) of the ocean floor, a system of mid-ocean ridges marks the boundaries where ...

In 2013, scientists were stunned to find microbes thriving deep inside volcanic rocks beneath the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest, buried under more than 870 feet of sediment. The rocks were on the ...