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 ...

The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor. Its formation was long thought to be the result of simple stretching of ...

Teeming with heat-loving microbes, samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

All around the world, from the Red Sea to the deep ocean ridges of the Atlantic, lurk more than a dozen geological misfits. These scraps of continental crust are found in the middle of oceans, ...

The formation and composition of oceanic crust remain central yet unresolved questions in plate tectonics. While seismic data suggest a globally uniform crustal thickness (~6 km), petrological ...