The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it. Eons is available to ...

On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be ...

We’ve known for a while that Mars was once a wet world. But there’s always been a geological puzzle regarding how and where ...

A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of ...

Have tectonic plates changed speed over the last 3 billion years? The answer has far-reaching implications, as plate tectonics affected everything from the supply of vital nutrients for early life to ...

Seismic waves from earthquakes have always offered a window into Earth’s hidden interior. For decades, researchers believed they had a firm grasp on how these waves revealed the rocky mantle’s secrets ...

An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets. Using advanced numerical models, the team systematically classified for the ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

The speed of seismic waves can reveal the temperature of structures under Earth’s surface, with faster waves indicating cooler temperatures and slower waves, warmer ones. Unusually low wave speeds ...