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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through the ...

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

Venus, a scorching wasteland of a planet according to scientists, may have once had tectonic plate movements similar to those believed to have occurred on early Earth, a new study found. PROVIDENCE, R ...

Anyone who has hovered over a jigsaw puzzle for hours knows that sometimes you can’t figure out how two pieces fit together until you’ve placed all the pieces around them. The same holds true for ...

A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction ...

If the solar system’s hottest world, once had plate tectonics, maybe it was also capable of sustaining life long ago. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

W. Jason Morgan, a Princeton University geologist who laid out an influential new vision of our evolving planet, attributing the most powerful upheavals — earthquakes, volcanoes and the formation of ...