McArie Island, located between New Zealand and Antarctica, is a geological treasure that offers a glimpse into Earth’s deep past. Unlike most islands, McArie is composed entirely of oceanic crust and ...

Researchers used zircons and AI to reconstruct Earth's ancient crust, revealing possible tectonic processes from the planet's ...

The make-up of the Earth, then, is a far more complex picture than people might recognise. “The oldest oceanic crust that exists anymore on Earth is about 180 million years old,” Dr Brenhin said.

Earth's gooey middle layer, the mantle, is made up mostly of magnesium and silicate. A new study finds that rocky chunks of oceanic crust are stuck at the deepest layers of the mantle, like ...

Miles beneath the sea surface, buried beneath the seafloor sediment, a relatively unstudied ecosystem of bacteria and other microbes teems with activity in the Earth's oceanic crust. Some ...

Oceanic crust is primarily composed of dark basalt rocks rich in elements such as silicon and magnesium whereas continental crust is made of light-colored granite rocks containing oxygen and silicon.

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate ...

The Earth's oceanic crust covers an enormous expanse, and is mostly buried beneath a thick layer of mud that cuts it off from the surface world. Scientists now document life deep within the ...

For Earth, the explanation is relatively straight forward: we have two types of crust. Oceanic crust that underlies the oceans is thin, dense and low in silica (silicon oxide) while continental crust ...

In 1981, scientists discovered one of the thinnest portions of the Earth’s crust — a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) thick, earthquake-prone spot under the Atlantic Ocean where the American and African ...

New research from HKU geologists suggests that Earth's first continents were born not from plate tectonics, but from deep ...