Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...

Rocks in Australia preserve evidence that plates in Earth’s crust were moving 3.5 billion years ago, a finding that pushes back the beginnings of plate tectonics by hundreds of millions of years.

Map of the Earth showing tectonic plates. Early Earth likely had no plate tectonics, but a solid outer crust with no tectonic activity covered the entire planet. After being broken up by convection ...

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 ...

Scientists are among the millions of die-hard Game of Thrones fans digesting the show’s finale today. The striking landscape of Game of Thrones has led some researchers to build climate simulations ...

Scientists say they have evidence of a new continental rift forming in southern Africa that could eventually develop into a ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...

This study is led by Prof. Yong-Fei Zheng at University of Science and Technology of China. It focuses on the development of tectonic processes along convergent plate margins through inspection of ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

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 ...