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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...

For decades, climate science has treated Earth’s shifting crust as a slow, distant backdrop to the drama of global warming.

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

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, ...

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 ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

Researchers have produced a new estimate for the origin of Earth's plate tectonics—the movement of large chunks of the planet's outer layer, or crust. Although there is broad consensus that plate ...

The tectonic plates are among the most powerful forces on Earth, exerting tremendous influence over every single life that unfolds on this planet. They are both creators and destroyers, capable of ...