In deep Earth, rocks take up and release water all the time, and the effects can be wide reaching. Dehydration can cause rocks to crack and trigger earthquakes, and over geologic timescales, this ...

Ancient rocks on the coast of Oman that were once driven deep down toward Earth's mantle may reveal new insights into subduction, an important tectonic process that fuels volcanoes and creates ...

Massive tectonic collisions in the tropics may have caused Earth's last three great ice ages.Before each of these ice ages, new research finds, collisions between continents and island arcs built long ...

Yale geophysicists reported that Earth’s ever-shifting, underground network of tectonic plates was firmly in place more than 4 billion years ago — at least a billion years earlier than scientists ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

From a distance, it’s not obvious that Earth is full of life. You have to get pretty close to see the biggest forests, and closer still to see the work of humans, let alone microbes. Nevertheless, ...

Geological processes shape the planet Earth and are in many ways essential to our planet's habitability for life. One important geological process is plate tectonics – the drifting, colliding and ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Massive tectonic collisions in the tropics may have caused Earth's last three great ice ages.