Science has advanced not just through steady progress, but often through the perseverance of individuals whose ideas were ...

Geologists have long-debated about when plate tectonics started on the planet. One of the key indicators has been whether or not fragments of oceanic crust, generated at sea-floor spreading ...

Mantle plumes are important geologic processes—they interact with plate tectonics, create rich mineral deposits, and even ...

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.

Hess proposes sea-floor spreading 1960 Photo: Harry Hess argues that the continents had once been one, and have drifted apart. With the discovery of plate tectonics and the mapping of the earth ...

At Earth's mid-ocean ridges, hot rock from Earth's core is forced up to the seafloor's surface and new ocean floor forms in a process known as seafloor spreading.

Jingchuan Wang said: "This thickened area is like a fossilized fingerprint of an ancient piece of seafloor that subducted into the Earth approximately 250 million years ago.

Geophysical phenomena ranging from earthquakes to continental drift are being explained by a new theory that gives promise of eventually relating geomagnetism and the earth's internal and orbital ...

University of Maryland scientists uncovered evidence of an ancient seafloor that sank deep into Earth during the age of dinosaurs, challenging existing theories about Earth’s interior structure.

After much thought, he proposed in 1960 that the movement of the continents was a result of sea-floor spreading. In 1962, he added a geologic mechanism to account for Wegener's moving continents. It ...