The audience was stunned. Atwater was the first person to use the newly revealed secrets of the seafloor to explain a geological feature on land. She showed her colleagues that anywhere you had ...

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 ...

For the first time in history, scientists have observed the rupture of a tectonic plate in a subduction zone in real time. The study, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, was ...

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 ...

Tectonic plates lost to the deep mantle carry a record of ancient surface tectonic processes. A method for retrieving such records has been developed that could clarify the links between tectonics and ...