Plate tectonics give Earth its mountains, earthquakes, continental drift and maybe even helped give rise to life itself. But do other planets in the solar system have them too?

Discover why Africa is slowly splitting into two continents due to the East African Rift. This geological transformation, ...

The plates make up Earth's outer shell, called the lithosphere. (This includes the crust and uppermost part of the mantle.) Churning currents in the molten rocks below propel them along like a ...

Plate tectonics is a theory that explains how Earth’s lithosphere—its upper mantle and crust—is split into sections called plates, which move. These movements create mountains, volcanoes and ...

At divergent boundaries, plates move away from each other and ... method 5 to measure the electrical resistivity of the region's lithosphere with naturally occurring radio waves.

Understanding plate tectonics is key to grasping how the Earth’s geology works and how oceans and continents came to be. These massive slabs, part of the ...

The layers can also be categorized into the rigid outer lithosphere (which includes the crust and top portion of the mantle and makes up Earth's tectonic plates) and the athenosphere, the portion ...

Earth's lithosphere — its crust and rigid upper mantle — is split into roughly 15 constantly-moving plates. These plates are perpetually shifting, colliding and pulling apart from one another.