Breathing quickly in the thin mountain air, my colleagues and I set down our equipment. We’re at the base of a jagged outcrop that protrudes upwards out of a steep gravel slope. The muffled soundscape ...

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 ...

Until recently, researchers believed only one planet in our solar system had plate tectonics: Earth. But in a recent study, Brown University researchers used atmospheric modeling to show that Venus, ...

With tectonic plates bumping and grinding against each other, Earth is a pretty active planet. But when did this activity begin? A new study from Yale University claims to have found evidence that ...

Anyone who has hovered over a jigsaw puzzle for hours knows that sometimes you can’t figure out how two pieces fit together until you’ve placed all the pieces around them. The same holds true for ...

A recent study published in Nature Astronomy provides evidence for how the planet Venus might have once had plate tectonic activity at the same time as the ancient Earth. This study was led by ...

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 ...

A post–World War II data boom clinched the unifying theory of plate tectonics after decades of debate over whether Earth’s crust was static or mobile, Carolyn Gramling reported in “Shaking up Earth” ...

Generally speaking, it’s easy enough to make sense of the last few million years of climate patterns—the world looked much as it does today, so changes in greenhouse gas concentrations or ocean ...

Readers who went to school before the late 1960s will probably remember that their science teachers couldn't explain why South America and Africa seemed to fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

The breakup of the supercontinent and formation of the current Afro-Eurasia landmass were caused by movement of Earth's tectonic plates. The position of these tectonic plates is preserved in magnetic ...