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 ...

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth’s mantle flows beneath the ocean’s tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal ...

New insights into the convection patterns of the Earth's mantle and its chemical makeup have been revealed. The new findings suggest that the mantle does not flow ubiquitously, as has been previously ...

The crust of volcanically active Venus could be churning with convection currents just like the Earth's mantle. This is the conclusion of researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis, who ...

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. The molten layer is located about 100 ...

If Yale researcher Jun Korenaga is correct, then habitable planets may be rarer than previously thought. According to a recently published paper, the ability of Earthlike planets to self-regulate ...

Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...

Remember back in fourth grade when your mind was blown that the continents and oceans are all actually moving, very slowly, and that they used to be in different forms? The theory of plate tectonics ...

Plate tectonics doesn’t rumple the surfaces of Earth’s supersized cousins, new research suggests. Simulating the extreme pressures inside giant exoplanets called super-Earths, researchers discovered ...