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 ...

This groundbreaking research offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Earth’s tectonic evolution from 1.8 Ga to the present, bridging critical gaps in pre-Pangean plate dynamics. By merging three ...

This study is led by Prof. Yong-Fei Zheng at University of Science and Technology of China. It focuses on the development of tectonic processes along convergent plate margins through inspection of ...

Scientists have found that the crust beneath East Africa’s Turkana Rift is thinning to a critical point, signaling that the ...

The Earth’s crust has been going through a rocky break up for around 2.5 billion years. Estimating when the Earth’s ever-shifting tectonic plates first emerged and how they evolved is tricky. Previous ...

An international team of Earth scientists led by Utrecht professor Douwe van Hinsbergen has developed an online tool that ...

A geologic map of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia. The rocks exposed here range from 2.5 to 3.5 billion years ago, offering a uniquely well-preserved window into Earth's deep past. The authors ...

An exceptionally well-preserved skull from a fish which lived 384–382 million years ago helps explain how plate tectonics played a key role in the evolution of ancient bony fish which eventually led ...

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 ...

Watch the Earth's tectonic plates grow, shrink, and jostle for position in this new model of the last billion years on the ...

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, ...