A megathrust earthquake is coming for the Pacific Northwest. But new imaging of undersea faults and fractures has given ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through the ...

Our planet has an outer layer made up of several plates, which move relative to one another. While we may take this knowledge for granted, this theory of plate tectonics was only formulated in the ...

For decades, the end-stage life of a subduction zone existed only in theory. Now, for the first time in geologic history, scientists are bearing witness to the Juan de Fuca Plate tearing apart and ...

The Earth with the upper mantle revealed. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a previously unknown layer of partly molten rock in a key region just below the tectonic ...

The Pontus oceanic plate that was reconstructed by Suzanna van de Lagemaat: its location in the paleo-Pacific ocean 120 million years ago, and its present relicts. An earlier study showed that a large ...

New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth's crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Plate boundaries are where the action is. A large fraction of all earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and mountain building occurs at plate boundaries. It is also where most of the people on Earth live.

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 ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth's tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...