How moving tectonic plates and rising heat from deep within Earth created one of the ocean’s largest canyons. On land, giant canyons like the Grand Canyon are usually the slow handiwork of rivers that ...

In deep Earth, rocks take up and release water all the time, and the effects can be wide reaching. Dehydration can cause rocks to crack and trigger earthquakes, and over geologic timescales, this ...

Earthquakes and volcanism occur as a result of plate tectonics. The movement of tectonic plates themselves is largely driven by the process known as subduction. The question of how new active ...

Ancient rocks on the coast of Oman that were once driven deep down toward Earth's mantle may reveal new insights into subduction, an important tectonic process that fuels volcanoes and creates ...

Climate change is usually associated with changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but our planet's surface also plays a major ...

With steep walls and deep valleys, the Grand Canyon in the western United States or the massive gorges that saw through the margins of the Tibetan Plateau are some of the most awesome and spectacular ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. A new study, using a combination of old models, new geophysical ...

Ground fissures and tectonic faults represent critical structural features within sedimentary basins, where the interplay of regional stress fields, depositional environments and, at times, human ...

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled with natural fluctuations in the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Over the past century, humans have pushed CO₂ ...

It was a groundbreaking discovery. Scientists have found previously concealed fault lines along California’s north coast, sparking concerns that we could be drastically underestimating the earthquake ...

Geological processes shape the planet Earth and are in many ways essential to our planet's habitability for life. One important geological process is plate tectonics – the drifting, colliding and ...