Geologists solve mystery of the Colorado Plateau

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of scientists led by Rice University has figured out why the Colorado Plateau – a 130,000-square-mile region that straddles Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico -- is rising even while parts ...

North American continent is a layer cake, scientists discover

(PhysOrg.com) -- 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 study ...

Banded rocks reveal early Earth conditions, changes

(PhysOrg.com) -- The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth more than 2 billion ...

Why earthquakes happen more frequently in Britain than Ireland

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies have discovered that variations in the thickness of tectonic plates relate directly to the distribution of earthquakes in Britain, ...

Researchers uncover secrets on how Alaska's Denali Fault formed

When the rigid plates that make up Earth's lithosphere brush against one another, they often form visible boundaries, known as faults, on the planet's surface. Strike-slip faults, such as the San Andreas Fault in California ...

Enhanced views of Earth tectonics

Scientists from Germany's Kiel University and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have used data from the European Space Agency (ESA), Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission to unveil key geological ...

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Lithosphere

The lithosphere ( /ˈlɪθəsfɪər/; Greek: λίθος [lithos] for "rocky" + σφαῖρα [sphaira] for "sphere") is the rigid outermost shell of a rocky planet. On Earth, it comprises the crust and the portion of the upper mantle that behaves elastically on time scales of thousands of years or greater.

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