Atwater’s analysis of magnetic signatures helped describe seafloor spreading, a major component of plate tectonics. She unearthed the geology and geography of California, describing the San Andreas ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

The audience was stunned. Atwater was the first person to use the newly revealed secrets of the seafloor to explain a ...

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model builds ...

Walk the halls of an academic earth sciences department, and you’ll likely find displayed on a wall somewhere a strikingly beautiful map of the world’s ocean floors. Completed in 1977, the map ...

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth’s mantle flows beneath the ocean’s tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal ...

WASHINGTON—A new global analysis of the last 19 million years of seafloor spreading rates found they have been slowing down. Geologists want to know why the seafloor is getting sluggish. New oceanic ...

The Earth is known for its constant evolution, but it was recently discovered by researchers that there is a trigger that leads to the planet's biodiversity seeing a massive boost, and it is through a ...

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled with natural fluctuations in the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Over the past century, humans have pushed CO₂ ...

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 ...

An upsurge of hot rock from deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean may be driving the continents on either side apart. The Americas are moving away from Europe and Africa by a few centimeters each year, as ...