A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction ...

Image: Tiny crystals called zircons are used to date oceanic crust. A newly developed method that detects tiny bits of zircon in rock reliably predicts the age of ocean crust more than 99 percent of ...

A hazardous fault line that runs south of downtown Seattle may have formed when the edge of the North American continent tore apart 55 million years ago, a new study suggests. Seattle sits atop the ...

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

A previously unknown connection between geological atmospheric carbon dioxide cycles and the fluctuating capacity of the ocean crust to store carbon dioxide has been uncovered by two geoscientists ...

The mid-ocean ridge runs through the oceans like a suture. Where Earth's plates move apart, new oceanic crust is continuously ...