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, ...

Earth’s mantle, a solid, superheated, churning mass that makes up 84 percent of our planet, is a beautiful, enigmatic place that’s responsible for keeping our world geologically alive. Thanks to this ...

Scientists warn that the plate beneath Gibraltar arc will begin to shift toward the Atlantic within 20 million years.

HOUSTON -- (May 29, 2018) -- New simulations of Earth's asthenosphere find that convective cycling and pressure-driven flow can sometimes cause the planet's most fluid layer of mantle to move even ...

On September 7, 2017, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck southern Mexico, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. While earthquakes are common enough in the region, this powerful event wasn’t any ...

Plate tectonics was founded in the late 1960s, and it concerns the distribution and movements of plates, the uppermost layer of the Earth. Plate movements not only control the distributions of ...

ANN ARBOR—As anyone with a smattering of geological knowledge knows, Earth’s crust is made up of plates that creep over the planet’s surface at a rate of several inches per year. But why do they move ...

Elements of a newly discovered process in plate tectonics include a mass (rock slab weight), a pulley (trench), a dashpot (microcontinent), and a string (oceanic plate) that connects these elements to ...

A team of geologists believes they have found the lost plate known as Resurrection in northern Canada by using existing mantle tomography images. The existence of a tectonic plate called Resurrection ...

A unique rock formation in China holds clues that tectonic plates subducted, or went underneath other plates, during the Archean eon (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), just as they do nowadays, a ...

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 ...

New simulations of the asthenosphere find that convective cycling and pressure-driven flow can sometimes cause Earth's most fluid layer of mantle to move even faster than the tectonic plates that ride ...