A hidden chunk of an ancient tectonic plate is stuck to the Pacific Ocean floor and sliding under North America, complicating earthquake risk at the Cascadia subduction zone.

By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

Our world’s surface is a jumble of jostling tectonic plates, with new ones emerging as others are pulled under. The ongoing cycle keeps our continents in motion and drives life on Earth. But what ...

Papers presented in a special symposium at the joint annual meeting of the Geological and Mineralogical Associations of Canada at St. John's in May, 1974. Tectonic settings for emplacement of ...

From time to time, when Earth's tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new modeling study published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, R. Dietmar ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today. Scientists are unlocking secrets about how plate tectonics forged our modern world ...

Our planet has an outer layer made up of several plates, which move relative to one another. While we may take this knowledge for granted, this theory of plate tectonics was only formulated in the ...

The quest to discover what drove one of the most important evolutionary events in the history of life on Earth has taken a new, fascinating twist. The quest to discover what drove one of the most ...

A new study introduces a novel way for tectonic plates — massive sheets of rock that jostle for position in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle — to bend and sink. It’s a bit of planetary Pilates that ...