Due to the radiative thermal conductivity of the mineral olivine, only oceanic plates over 60 million years old and ...

Sea level on Earth has been rising and falling ever since there was water on the planet. Scientists were already able to use ...

Geologists have uncovered the remains of a massive tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean, a plate that had been hidden for ...

Chemical fingerprints from volcanic rock offer hints of what’s happening in the mantle below the area where three rift zones ...

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate ...

A plume of molten rock rising from the depths of the Earth in heartbeat-like pulses is slowly tearing Africa apart—and will ...

Surprisingly, geologists don't have a good answer for when plate tectonics emerged, and estimates range from 700 million years ago to before 4 billion years ago, when Earth was still in its infancy.

Plate tectonics allows heat from Earth's interior to escape to the surface, forming continents and other geological features necessary for life to emerge. Accordingly, ...

New research hints that plate tectonics began earlier than 4 billion years ago — not long after Earth had formed. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission ...

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, drive the world’s most devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. How do these danger zones come to be? A study in Geology presents ...

Scientists have detected rhythmic pulses of molten rock rising beneath eastern Africa, threatening to pull the continent ...

If plate tectonics had existed during the 600 million years covered in this study, then you’d expect the zircon crystals to have formed at a variety of latitudes as the plates move around. That in ...