A chunk of the Earth's crust is missing and scientists have discovered where it is ...

The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make that continental crust.” Johnson and his colleagues are now arguing that the ...

For more than seven decades, phosphorus has represented one of the great paradoxes in the study of the origin of life. This element, indispensable for the existence of living beings as we know them, ...

Bathymetry of the seafloor around the Southeast Indian Rift where two tectonic plates abruptly opened a portal to the magmatic underworld in April 2024. (Royer et al., Nature, 2026) Most of our planet ...

Researchers have spent decades hunting for clues about the origins of the process that moves the continents around. Its deep history is finally starting to come into focus. Earth’s outer shell ...

A global constellation of neutrino detectors is creating a never-before-seen view of the radioactive elements that power ...

The crusty conundrum carries fundamental implications. The thickness of continental crust — the part of Earth’s crust that forms land masses and continents — plays an important role in everything from ...

Despite decades of effort, humans have only drilled 0.2% into Earth’s crust. Heat, pressure, and flowing rock make reaching ...

Earth’s tilt recently made headlines when scientists revealed it had deviated 31.5 inches. That data came from a June study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, that found human ...

Earth, our home planet, is a world unlike any other. The third planet from the sun, Earth is the only place in the known universe confirmed to host life. With a radius of 3,959 miles, Earth is the ...