The desert floor in Ethiopia looks fixed and ancient, but it is moving. Across the Afar region and down the East African Rift ...

That would have enabled more of this organic carbon—and carbonate accumulating in shallow water around Columbia—to be ...

Map of the Earth showing tectonic plates. Early Earth likely had no plate tectonics, but a solid outer crust with no tectonic activity covered the entire planet. After being broken up by convection ...

Earth is truly unique among our Solar System’s planets. It has vast water oceans and abundant life. But Earth is also unique because it is the only planet with plate tectonics, which shaped its ...

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, ...

A new study of rocks that formed billions of years ago lends fresh insight into how Earth's plate tectonics—the movement of large pieces of Earth's outer shell—evolved over the planet's ...

A new study suggests that plate tectonics -- a scientific theory that divides the earth into large chunks of crust that move slowly over hot viscous mantle rock -- could have been active from the ...

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 ...

Make sure you pencil this into your long-term calendar, estimates place the death of plate tectonics here on Earth at 1.45 billion years from now. The existence of plate tectonics on Earth makes it ...