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 ...

The oceanic lithosphere, which constitutes the top layer including Earth's crust and mantle below the oceans, has long intrigued scientists due to its peculiar behavior. This layer appears to glide ...

Researchers in Japan have used measurements of the aftershocks of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake to gain insight into the dynamics of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Nozomu Takeuchi and colleagues at ...

New simulations of the asthenosphere find that convective cycling and pressure-driven flow can sometimes cause Earth's most fluid layer of mantle to move even faster than the tectonic plates that ride ...

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, ...

New research from the University of Houston reevaluates the role of the asthenosphere in tectonic plate movement. According to the new study published in Nature Communications by scientists from the ...

Plate subduction and delamination, two key processes driving plate tectonics, are thought to be controlled by the buoyancy of the lithospheric mantle relative to the underlying asthenosphere. Most ...

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth’s mantle flows beneath the ocean’s tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal ...

The first-order configuration of the Himalayan orogen is defined by northward motion of the Indian plate, whether directly underplating Tibetan crust or subducting beneath a mantle wedge. Here we used ...

HOUSTON -- (May 29, 2018) -- New simulations of Earth's asthenosphere find that convective cycling and pressure-driven flow can sometimes cause the planet's most fluid layer of mantle to move even ...