15-05-06 In the history of continental drift, India has been a mysterious record-holder. More than 140 million years ago, India was part of an immense supercontinent called Gondwana, which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere. Around 120 million years ago...

15-05-04 University of Sydney geoscientists have helped prove that some of the ocean's underwater volcanoes did not erupt from hot spots in Earth's mantle but instead formed from cracks or fractures in the oceanic crust. The discovery helps explain the spect...

14-09-10 In the typical textbook picture, volcanoes, such as those that are forming the Hawaiian islands, erupt when magma gushes out as narrow jets from deep inside Earth. But that picture is wrong, according to a new study from researchers at Caltech and t...

14-06-16 Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form -- the ingredients for water are bound up in rock...

13-09-22 A magnitude 8.3 earthquake that struck deep beneath the Sea of Okhotsk on May 24, 2013, has left seismologists struggling to explain how it happened. At a depth of about 609 kilometers (378 miles), the intense pressure on the fault（断层） should in...

13-08-10 The key to understanding Earth's evolution is to look at how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle -- a region some 400 to 1,800 miles (660 to 2,900 kilometers) below the surface. Researchers at the Carnegie Institution, with colleagues at the...

13-08-01 If some volcanoes operate on geologic timescales, Costa Rica's Iraz had something of a short fuse（火爆脾气） . In a new study in the journal Nature, scientists suggest that the 1960s eruption of Costa Rica's largest stratovolcano（成层火山） was tr...

13-03-21 Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have found a layer of liquefied molten rock in Earth's mantle that may be acting as a lubricant（润滑剂） for the sliding motions of the planet's massive tectonic plates. The discover...

13-01-20 Researchers still have much to learn about the volcanism that shaped our planet's early history. New evidence from a team led by Carnegie's Frances Jenner demonstrates that some of the tectonic（构造的） processes driving volcanic activity, such as...

10-06-03 If tectonic plate（地壳构造板块 ） collisions cause volcanic eruptions, as every fifth grader knows, why do some volcanoes erupt far from a plate boundary? A study in Nature suggests that volcanoes and mountains in the Mediterranean can grow from th...