Earth’s crust may have gone on the move roughly 3.8 billion years ago. “Earth is actually quite distinct to other planets, in that it has plate tectonics,” says study coauthor Nadja Drabon, a ...

The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have originated from a huge impact billions of years ago. This huge collision with the Earth, thought to have occurred around 4.5 ...

The face of the Earth has changed drastically over its life, with plates shifting and sinking. Now, geologists at the University of Houston claim to have found the remains of an ancient tectonic plate ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...

If you think about mountain ranges like the Andes or the Himalayas, you can come up with multiple factors that must affect their size and shape. There’s the collision of tectonic plates that squeezes ...

The findings were buried beneath billions of years of Earth history. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Earth's constantly moving ...

No one is at their best when they are dehydrated and that goes for tectonic plates too. Researchers using a thermomechanical model of the Alaska subduction zone indicates that plate dehydration is at ...

Geologists have uncovered the remains of a massive tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean, a plate that had been hidden for over 160 million years. Known as Pontus, this tectonic giant once covered ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through the ...

A peek into the curious geology of the Pacific Northwest helps tease apart what may happen when the last bits of an oceanic plate get swallowed up. Scientists on board the R/V Thomas G. Thompson ...

Utrecht University PhD candidate Suzanna van de Lagemaat has reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. She reconstructed ...