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 ...

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 ...

Map of Earth's principal tectonic plates. Earth's lithosphere. Major and minor plates. arrows indicate direction of movement at plate boundaries. Vector illustration. Billions of years ago, Earth's ...

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 outer shell suffered a catastrophic break on 6 February last year, when a major fault came to life in southern Turkey. The Anatolian peninsula suddenly lurched to the southwest by as much as ...

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. Researchers had previously identified ...

A unique rock formation in China holds clues that tectonic plates subducted, or went underneath other plates, during the Archean eon (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), just as they do nowadays, a ...

Earth’s crust may have gone on the move roughly 3.8 billion years ago. “Earth is actually quite distinct to other planets, in that it has plate tectonics,” says study coauthor Nadja Drabon, a ...

Earth’s surface is constantly shifting, shaped by the slow but powerful movement of tectonic plates. While some plates have ...

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.

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 ...

William Jason Morgan, a leading scholar of plate tectonics and mantle movements, died on July 31 in his sleep, at the home he shared with his daughter and her family. He was 87. Morgan, Princeton ...