The first step in gold’s journey does not happen in a mine, a fault, or a hydrothermal vent. It begins far deeper, in mantle rock melting beneath the seafloor.

Slow roiling convection currents deep within Earth's mantle, which are associated with the movements of tectonic plates, also ...

Far below your feet, nearly 1,800 miles beneath oceans and continents, Earth carries two massive scars from its violent youth. They are so large they rival continents in size, yet no human will ever ...

Sunken slabs from long-lost tectonic plates are still churning around in Earth's interior, far below your feet. In a new ...

Learn how subduction zones become enriched in gold through repeated melting of Earth's mantle.

When you learned about the center of the Earth in school, you were probably shown a diagram that looked like a perfect layer cake—but in fact, that diagram is wildly inaccurate! Join Stefan Chin for a ...

An ancient slab of Earth's crust buried deep beneath the Midwest is sucking huge swatches of present-day's North American crust down into the mantle, researchers say. The slab's pull has created giant ...

Earth’s deep interior still shapes the world above your feet. Water trapped far below the surface helps control how rocks move, melt, and recycle through the mantle. Some of that water carries a ...

Earth's "gold kitchen" lies deep beneath the seafloor. Island arcs, whose volcanoes form above subduction zones where one ...

NSF: Researchers have found a primitive Earth mantle reservoir on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Geologist Matthew Jackson and his colleagues from a multi-institution collaboration report the ...

Olivine, the most common mineral in the upper 400 km (about 250 miles) of Earth’s interior, has long been studied for how it deforms. Scientists have identified two primary directions of dislocation ...

A new model suggests “mantle rain” ensures we will always have a surface ocean Theo Nicitopoulos, Hakai The Earth’s oceans have risen and fallen over the millennia. But they have, on average, been ...