The lithosphere is the layer of Earth we call home. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The lithosphere is the outermost layer of ...

Peeling back each of Earth's layers reveals a lot about our planet's formation. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Earth's layers ...

Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth's crust: the lithosphere and underlying ...

Learn how subduction zones form, drive massive earthquakes, create volcanoes, and shape Earth’s surface through powerful tectonic processes.

Boulder, Colo., USA: Too deep to see or reach via drilling, the Moho (crust-mantle transition) remains something of a mystery more than a hundred years after its discovery. This insightful, ...

The processes that form continental crust from the denser basaltic rocks of the upper mantle may make the lower lithosphere denser than the underlying mantle. One theory holds that the lower ...

In 1981, scientists discovered one of the thinnest portions of the Earth’s crust — a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) thick, earthquake-prone spot under the Atlantic Ocean where the American and African ...

Map of Earth's principal tectonic plates. Earth's lithosphere. Major and minor plates. arrows indicate direction of movement at plate boundaries. Vector illustration. Billions of years ago, Earth's ...

The fragmentation of continents at convergent plate boundaries is thought to be influenced by the subducting lithosphere. Numerical modelling suggests that instead, the forces exerted by the ...

The oceanic trenches are hemispheric-scale long but narrow topographic depressions of the sea floor. They also are the deepest parts of the ocean floor. Trenches define one of the most important ...