Researchers in Japan have used measurements of the aftershocks of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake to gain insight into the dynamics of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Nozomu Takeuchi and colleagues at ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A mysterious layer lies beneath Earth's massive tectonic plates. Sandwiched between two rock ...

All in line: "Imaging" the tectonic plate off New Zealand's coast A thin, low-viscosity layer at the base of a tectonic plate has been imaged at a depth of 100 km beneath North Island, New Zealand, by ...

Too deep to see or reach via drilling, the Moho (crust-mantle transition) remains something of a mystery more than a hundred years after its discovery. This insightful, multidisciplinary volume ...

A mysterious drop in the speed of seismic waves as they zip through the Earth could shed light on why the hot, flowing rock the planet's tectonic plates rest on is so weak, researchers say. These ...

The North American continent is not one thick, rigid slab, but a layer cake of ancient, 3 billion-year-old rock on top of much newer material probably less than 1 billion years old, according to a new ...

New images are arriving of the largest crash under way on Earth, involving the entire Indian subcontinent diving underneath Tibet. This giant collision might seem incredibly slow to outsiders, with ...

In a surprising study in Nature, a team led by a Brown University graduate student shows that a sharp boundary exists between the Earth's hard outermost shell and a more pliable layer beneath, a ...

Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth's crust: the lithosphere and underlying ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Too deep to see or reach via drilling, the Moho (crust-mantle transition) remains something of a mystery more than a hundred years after its discovery. This insightful, ...