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 ...

Teeming with heat-loving microbes, samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion ...

The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor. Its formation was long thought to be the result of simple stretching of ...

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 ...

Over millions of years, the Earth’s upper layers have performed a dance that has created mountains, volcanoes, continents, ridges and ocean trenches. Tectonic plates play a key role in this process.

Around 510 million years ago, after a major gap in the geologic record, the world flooded. This gap, known as the Great Unconformity, starts at different ages in different places, but it always ...

Discover 25 surprising facts about Earth's continents and plates! Learn how our planet constantly shifts, from floating ...