BEERSHEBA, Israel, Aug. 15 (UPI) --The oldest oceanic crust on Earth lies at the bottom of the eastern Mediterranean in the Herodotus Basin, a seafloor depression north of Egypt and Libya.

One of the key indicators has been whether or not fragments of oceanic crust, generated at sea-floor spreading centers, are preserved in the planet's oldest crust. New research integrating what has ...

The ocean floor is the ultimate recycling center. While the Earth’s continental crust can exist for billions of years, movement of tectonic plates causes subduction, which is when the ocean ...

Deep beneath the Earth’s surface, researchers have uncovered striking new evidence of ancient seafloor ... between the crust and the core. Their findings reveal a dense slab of oceanic crust ...

Scientists have identified an expanse of rock in Greenland as a remnant of Earth's crust dating ... rocks are the oldest intact oceanic crustal rocks on Earth formed by sea floor spreading ...

The world’s oldest oceanic crust lies nearby at the bottom of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. According to research by Dr. Roi Granot of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published on the ...

Previously, the oldest rocks ... ancient outcrops of oceanic crust marked by long, parallel cracks filled with volcanic rock. Tension caused this ancient piece of seafloor to split, the ...

More surrounded by a rocky mantle in direct contact with an ocean under the icy crust. New research models how internal heat may fuel volcanoes on the seafloor ... even the oldest sea ice is ...

Unlike volcanic seamounts, which are made of the basalt that's typical of most of the seafloor, Atlantis Massif includes rock types that are usually only found much deeper in the ocean crust ...

Despite covering 66% of Earth's surface, the deep ocean remains largely unexplored. The study, "How Little We've Seen: A Visual Coverage Estimate of the Deep Seafloor," is the first to document ...

Researchers previously knew that giant tubeworms and other creatures lived on the seafloor. "To our knowledge, it is the first time that animal life has been discovered in the ocean crust," marine ...