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

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 ...

Ken Sims, a professor in UW’s Department of Geology and Geophysics, recently received a $325,841 National Science Foundation grant to look at understanding the processes and timescales of basalt ...

A new analysis of rocks thought to be at least 2.5 billion years old by researchers at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History helps clarify the chemical history of Earth's mantle—the ...

Relative plate motions and plate boundary geometries are from Cao et al. (2024), with plate motions placed in a mantle reference frame. Continents are light grey, with continental margins shown in ...