The tiny Juan de Fuca plate is largely responsible for the volcanoes that dot the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The plates make up Earth's outer shell, called the lithosphere. (This includes ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today.

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 ...

The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have originated from a huge impact billions of years ago. This huge collision with the Earth, thought to have occurred around 4.5 ...

For decades, geologists labeled a billion-year stretch of Earth’s history—from 1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago—as the “Boring ...

A new study of rocks that formed billions of years ago lends fresh insight into how Earth's plate tectonics—the movement of large pieces of Earth's outer shell—evolved over the planet's ...

Along submarine mountain ranges, the mid-ocean ridges, forces from the Earth's interior push tectonic plates apart, forming new ocean floor and thus moving continents about. However, many features of ...

Modern plate tectonics may have gotten under way as early as 3.2 billion years ago, about 400 million years earlier than scientists thought. That, in turn, suggests that the movement of large pieces ...

There’s no geological artist quite like Earth’s plate tectonics. Thanks to this ongoing operation, we have mountains and oceans, terrifying earthquakes, incandescent volcanic eruptions, and new land ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Despite being our closest planetary neighbor, Venus is a pretty ...

If you think about mountain ranges like the Andes or the Himalayas, you can come up with multiple factors that must affect their size and shape. There’s the collision of tectonic plates that squeezes ...

Scientists studying rocks in South Africa report evidence for the earliest known earthquake triggered by plate tectonics. The temblor struck more than 3 billion years ago. The rocks preserve telltale ...