Earthquakes happen due to sudden movement of tectonic plates and stress release along fault lines beneath the Earth’s crust.

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 ...

THAT AUTUMN, A RESEARCH VESSEL called the Glomar Challenger sailed over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to drill holes and sample sediment. Fossils within the sediment samples they retrieved gave scientists a ...

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. Researchers had previously identified ...

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 finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that 'when we're looking for exoplanets that ...

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

Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth’s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. By Robin George Andrews Within the next decade or so, Venus will be ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, my colleagues and I have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — At the boundaries between tectonic plates, narrow rifts can form as Earth’s crust slowly pulls apart. But how, exactly, does this rifting happen? Does pressure from magma rising from ...