Two enormous continent-sized "islands" found buried deep inside the Earth's mantle are challenging our ideas about our planet's inner workings. These unexpected regions of the Earth's innards appear ...

The oceanic lithosphere forms at the summit of ocean ridges during seafloor spreading. Still, the formation of ocean basins is complex, influenced by smaller-scale convection, stagnated pieces of the ...

Cratons are the most ancient, stable pieces of tectonic plates, but even these geological formations can change over time. A new study details how the North American plate is “dripping” into the ...

Beneath the American Midwest, on the continent of North America, the underside of Earth's crust is dripping into the planetary interior. There, blobs of molten rock are coalescing in the upper mantle ...

Artist impression of two types of lithospheric drip. One type produces thickening and uplift of Earth’s crust, while the other results in the formation of a basin at the surface without horizontal ...

The vertical movement of the mantle is one of the driving forces that brings about large-scale geological changes to the surface of our planet. These mantle upwellings, sometimes referred to as mantle ...

For billions of years, the continents have cruised across Earth’s surface like tectonic vessels, but they have not survived unscathed. Waves in the underlying layer known as the mantle can scour off ...

Tungsten (W), a hard, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant metal, is indispensable to modern high-tech industries—from aerospace and defense to computing. While its global distribution is uneven, ...

Deep within Earth’s mantle lie two enormous regions, often referred to as "islands," which are the size of continents.

The oldest crust on Earth, known to be unchanging, is actually being altered in real time. The North American continent is "dripping" rock into the lower layers of the Earth, new research says, and in ...