Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...

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

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

Earth's surface is broken up into large plates that rub against each other, causing earthquakes, volcanoes and large mountain ranges. But how unique is our planet's geology? When you purchase through ...

Earth surface is covered with rigid plates that move, crash into each other and dive into the planet's interior. But when did this process begin? When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Some great ideas shake up the world. For centuries, the outermost layer of Earth was thought to be static, rigid, locked in place. But the theory of plate tectonics has rocked this picture of the ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth ...

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 ...

The theory of Plate tectonics – developed from Alfred Wegener’s theory of Continental Drift to explain the movement of the continents – has become the prevailing theory underpinning our understanding ...

The tectonic plates are among the most powerful forces on Earth, exerting tremendous influence over every single life that unfolds on this planet. They are both creators and destroyers, capable of ...