Earth's crust ranges from 5 to 70 kilometers in thickness and serves as the planet's outermost layer. This thin shell represents less than one percent of Earth's total mass, yet it's the only layer we ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." To understand the mantle—the largest layer of Earth’s rocky body—scientists drill deep cores out of the ...

Earth’s deep interior still shapes the world above your feet. Water trapped far below the surface helps control how rocks move, melt, and recycle through the mantle. Some of that water carries a ...

Unsustainable irrigation and drought have emptied nearly all of the Aral Sea’s water since the 1960s, causing changes extending all the way down to Earth’s upper mantle, the layer beneath the planet’s ...

A new model suggests “mantle rain” ensures we will always have a surface ocean Theo Nicitopoulos, Hakai The Earth’s oceans have risen and fallen over the millennia. But they have, on average, been ...

Lavas from hotspots - -whether erupting in Hawaii, Samoa or Iceland -- likely originate from a worldwide, uniform reservoir in Earth's mantle, according to an evaluation of volcanic hotspots. Lavas ...

Beneath Earth s surface, nearly 3,000 kilometers down, lies a mysterious layer where seismic waves speed up inexplicably. For decades, scientists puzzled over this D' layer. Now, groundbreaking ...

The mineral olivine contains melt inclusions (black dots), just a few micrometers in size. The geochemists isolated these inclusions and investigated the isotopic composition with mass spectrometers.

The illustration shows a cutaway revealing the interior of early Earth with a hot, melted layer above the boundary between the core and mantle. Scientists think some material from the core leaked into ...