The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth ...

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, ...

Jack looks at projections of Earth’s continents far into the future, exploring geological and plate tectonic predictions for how landmasses could shift over hundreds of millions of years, backed by ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earth's fractured outer shell is in perpetual motion. While usually imperceptible to us surface dwellers, these pieces of a rocky jigsaw puzzle are constantly crashing together, diving beneath one ...

Scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence yet that Earth’s tectonic plates were on the move 3.5 billion years ago. By analyzing magnetic fingerprints in ancient rocks, they reconstructed ...

Scientists examining rocks older than 3 billion years discovered that the Earth's tectonic plates move around today much as they did between 2 and 4 billion years ago. The findings suggest that the ...

Researchers have produced a new estimate for the origin of Earth's plate tectonics—the movement of large chunks of the planet's outer layer, or crust. Although there is broad consensus that plate ...