For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

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 ...

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 ...

Without plate tectonics, our planet wouldn’t have continents, mountains, and possibly even life itself. New evidence suggests this geological process began at least 3.2 billion years ago, a ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...