Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, my colleagues and I have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s ...

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 Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland. This area is the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which move apart ~ 2.5 cm/year over millennia. When plate tectonics first emerged ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

The tectonic plates are among the most powerful forces on Earth, exerting tremendous influence over every single life that unfolds on this planet. They are both creators and destroyers, capable of ...

For the first time in history, scientists have observed the rupture of a tectonic plate in a subduction zone in real time. The study, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, was ...

On Earth, the land moves. Over millions of years, continents shift and the entire surface of the planet reshapes itself. The driver of all this is plate tectonics: Earth’s surface is divided into ...

Mars An anomaly in Mars' mantle could trigger volcanoes to erupt — and may be causing the whole planet to spin faster Dinosaurs Archaeopteryx, one of the world's first proto birds, has a set of weird, ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...