Geologists from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how Earth's early continents ...

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate ...

Researchers mapped a pulsing mantle plume under Afar that channels molten rock upward, stretching Africa’s crust until it ...

Tectonic Jigsaw Figuring that out means first understanding how plate tectonics work. Earth was born 4.54 billion years ago in the pyres of the early solar system.

Dive into the world beneath your feet and discover what tectonic plates are, how they move, and why they're responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes, and the shifting of continents.

Magnetic fields are thought to govern the lifetime of protoplanetary disks by mediating the inward accretion of gas. At finer scales, magnetic instabilities may have led to turbulent eddies where the ...

But more suspect that plate tectonics emerged earlier, in the Archean eon, which ran from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. The evidence is based largely on chemical analyses of rocks.

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life.

Sedimentary basins are the largest potential stores of captured carbon dioxide and serve as important environments for other resources such as hydrogen and hydrocarbon fuels. Better understanding the ...

So if plate tectonics happened earlier, the evidence may no longer be around. Therefore, it’s possible that plate tectonics started not long after Earth formed, according to Harrison.

Plate tectonics is unique in that the entire surface is divided into shells, or plates that have sharp boundaries. On Earth, these boundaries are known as subduction zones, where plates are forced ...