On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be ...

What causes lava to gush from volcanoes in plumes of liquid fire or the ground to shake like the world is ending? Plate tectonics. What causes plate tectonics? Not so fast. Until now, the answer was ...

The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

There’s a small problem with Earth’s magnetic field: It should not have existed, as Earth’s rock record indicates it has, for the past 3.5 billion years. Motions in the Earth’s molten iron core ...

Seismic waves from earthquakes have always offered a window into Earth’s hidden interior. For decades, researchers believed they had a firm grasp on how these waves revealed the rocky mantle’s secrets ...

IT has become clear in recent years that there is a formidable case for continental drift. The most convincing single piece of evidence comes from palæomagnetism 1, but this is amply supported by a ...

Venus, our planetary neighbor, displays strange geological formations on its surface in the shape of coronae that have ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Combining gravity data, chemistry and how seismic waves are ...

THE recent spell of hot sunny weather in England made possible a series of experiments concerning the existence and magnitude of thermal convection currents in the air, arising from the reflection of ...

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL--There's a small problem with Earth's magnetic field: It should not have existed, as Earth's rock record indicates it has, for the past 3.5 billion years. Motions in the Earth's ...