“Where is the impactor?” The question, raised during a planetary science lecture back in 2019, struck a chord with geophysicist Qian Yuan. The answer, he suspected, was neither in an asteroid belt nor ...

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 ...

Due to the radiative thermal conductivity of the mineral olivine, only oceanic plates over 60 million years old and subducting at more than 10 centimeters per year remain sufficiently cold to ...