When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Plate tectonics is the means through which mountains are formed. The Baird Mountains in Alaska’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 ...

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 ...

Researchers used small zircon crystals to unlock information about magmas and plate tectonic activity in early Earth. The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely ...

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

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 ...

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 ...

New data indicating that Earth’s surface broke up about 3.2 billion years ago helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life. In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten ...

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...