Rare earth elements’ (REEs) are not actually rare in the Earth’s crust, but their extraction and processing are challenging.

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

That's great for hydropower, recreation, and ensuring there's enough water for basic human needs—but how those dams affect ...

Our planet has been asteroid-smashed, melted and eroded, enough that most of its original armor has been long buried. Except ...

Earth's crust may "drip" into its middle layer under growing mountain ranges. This odd process, called lithospheric dripping, has been proposed to occur under the Andes, in Central Asia, in the U ...

The ancient history of Earth has always been hard to read. Most of the planet’s earliest crust has been lost, buried, or ...

Scientists reveal that earthquakes generate electricity in quartz, explaining how enormous gold nuggets grow in deep rock fractures.

The Earth's mantle might not always move along in lockstep with the overlying tectonic crust—as set out in science textbooks for decades—but may instead behave differently. This is the ...

Beneath the American Midwest, on the continent of North America, the underside of Earth's crust is dripping into the planetary interior. There, blobs of molten rock are coalescing in the upper ...

The Earth's granite crust harbours continental landmasses that have remained stable and above mean sea level for more than a billion years 1. The withdrawal of large volumes of granitic magma from ...

One possible sign is that lithospheric dripping can pull the crust above into wrinkly ridges and valleys, forming small-scale mountains.

One possible sign is that lithospheric dripping can pull the crust above into wrinkly ridges and valleys, forming small-scale mountains. In Turkey, though, there was no such telltale sign of ...