A handful of ancient zircon crystals found in South Africa hold the oldest evidence of subduction, a key element of plate tectonics, according to a new study published in the open access journal AGU ...

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 ...

From time to time, when Earth's tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new modeling study published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, R. Dietmar ...

It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

The early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where lava fields stretch as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides tower above the clouds and stark black sand beaches outline the land. But the ...

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 ...

To learn why, where, and how earthquakes happen, you need to familiarize your students with the interior of the Earth and a model called plate tectonics. The engine behind the earthquake machine is ...

Generally speaking, it’s easy enough to make sense of the last few million years of climate patterns—the world looked much as it does today, so changes in greenhouse gas concentrations or ocean ...

Craig O'Neill receives funding from the ARC. Plate tectonics may be a phase in the evolution of planets that has implications for the habitability of exoplanets, according to new research published ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

A tectonic plate that appears to be “peeling apart” on the seabed off the coast of Portugal may one day “shrink” the Atlantic Ocean, scientists say. Joao Duarte, a scientist at the Instituto Dom Luiz ...