The audience was stunned. Atwater was the first person to use the newly revealed secrets of the seafloor to explain a ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today. Scientists are unlocking secrets about how plate tectonics forged our modern world ...

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.

A study led by Prof. Yong-Fei Zheng at University of Science and Technology of China focused on the development of tectonic processes along convergent plate margins through inspection of recent ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

The map highlights in yellow the zones of the Pacific Plate that are being pulled apart by the sinking tectonic plate along the Pacific Ring of Fire.

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 interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

Some great ideas shake up the world. For centuries, the outermost layer of Earth was thought to be static, rigid, locked in place. But the theory of plate tectonics has rocked this picture of the ...

Seismic tremors reveal a shallow fragment of ancient tectonic plate beneath Northern California, helping explain damaging ...

A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction ...