Our planet's most abundant mineral now has a name

Deep below the earth's surface lies a thick, rocky layer called the mantle, which makes up the majority of our planet's volume. For decades, scientists have known that most of the lower mantle is a silicate mineral with a ...

New evidence for oceans of water deep in the Earth

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form—the ingredients for ...

Scientists may have identified echoes of ancient Earth

A group of scientists believe that a previously unexplained isotopic ratio from deep within the Earth may be a signal from material from the time before the Earth collided with another planet-sized body, leading to the creation ...

Ancient rocks yield clues about Earth's earliest crust

(Phys.org) —It looks like just another rock, but what Jesse Reimink holds in his hands is a four-billion-year-old chunk of an ancient protocontinent that holds clues about how the Earth's first continents formed.

New insight into the temperature of deep Earth

Scientists from the Magma and Volcanoes Laboratory (CNRS) and the European Synchrotron, the ESRF, have recreated the extreme conditions 600 to 2900 km below the Earth's surface to investigate the melting of basalt in the ...

Hot mantle drives elevation, volcanism along mid-ocean ridges

Scientists have shown that temperature differences deep within Earth's mantle control the elevation and volcanic activity along mid-ocean ridges, the colossal mountain ranges that line the ocean floor. The findings, published ...

A wet Moon

The Moon's status as a "dry" rock in space has long been questioned. Competing theories abound as to the source of the H20 in the lunar soil, including delivery of water to the Moon by comets.

Earth's mantle plasticity explained

Earth's mantle is a solid layer that undergoes slow, continuous convective motion. But how do these rocks deform, thus making such motion possible, given that minerals such as olivine (the main constituent of the upper mantle) ...

New study reveals insights on plate tectonics

(Phys.org) —The Earth's outer layer is made up of a series of moving, interacting plates whose motion at the surface generates earthquakes, creates volcanoes and builds mountains. Geoscientists have long sought to understand ...

page 17 from 24