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 study proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle. The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of ...

Have tectonic plates changed speed over the last 3 billion years? The answer has far-reaching implications, as plate tectonics affected everything from the supply of vital nutrients for early life to ...

Jan. 18 (UPI) --New mantle convection models show heat from Earth's core is a driving factor of plate tectonics. Until now, scientists believed cooling was the primary factor. Current tectonics models ...

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 ...

On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be ...

The Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago and has been continuously changing ever since. For instance, the Himalayas continue to ...

A mid-ocean ridge or mid-oceanic ridge is an underwater mountain range, formed by plate tectonics. This uplifting of the ocean floor occurs when convection currents rise in the mantle beneath the ...

Scientists have discovered an unusually thick mantle transition zone beneath the Lesser Antilles. This discovery sheds new light on how oceanic plates sink into the Earth's mantle. Variations in rock ...

Seismic waves from earthquakes have always offered a window into Earth’s hidden interior. For decades, researchers believed they had a firm grasp on how these waves revealed the rocky mantle’s secrets ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Combining gravity data, chemistry and how seismic waves are ...

A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of ...