Deep below the Tyrrhenian Sea offshore Italy, scientists drilled into what they thought would be dark mantle rock—and found pieces of granite that seemingly had no business being there. Those unexpected intrusions turned ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 4, 2026
0
12
Isotope analysis of gas from geothermal springs in Zambia could show that a new continental rift is forming, scientists say. Unexpectedly high helium isotope ratios indicate that a weakness in Earth's crust has broken through ...
Earth Sciences
May 12, 2026
0
179
About 600 million years ago, the continents wandered Earth, yet to settle into their current positions. Their locations during the Ediacaran (as this time is called) have been tough for scientists to pin down. Earth's magnetic ...
Earth Sciences
May 5, 2026
0
15
Eastern Africa's Turkana Rift is both a hotbed for fossil discoveries of our earliest ancestors and a literal hotbed of volcanic activity caused by shifting tectonic plates. Now researchers have found that Earth's underlying ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 23, 2026
0
64
When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the familiar geography of today ...
Great things can come from failure when it comes to geology. The Midcontinent rift formed about 1.1 billion years ago and runs smack in the middle of the United States at the Great Lakes. The rift failed to completely rupture, ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 4, 2026
0
69
A study on tectonic plates that converge on the Tibetan Plateau has shown that Earth's fault lines are far weaker and the continents are less rigid than scientists previously thought. This finding is based on ground-monitoring ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 2, 2026
0
39
The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor. Its formation was long thought to be the result of simple stretching of the oceanic crust. An international ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 29, 2026
0
28
Climate change is accelerating continental rifting, the geological process where landmasses slowly pull apart. According to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, the East African Rift System (EARS) became ...
