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 ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

Around the Balkan Peninsula, the African plate is sinking beneath the European plate. A piece of deeply submerged African crust resurfaced 40 million years ago far away from the sinking zone. How this ...

One of Earth’s defining features is its plate tectonics, a phenomenon that shapes the planet’s surface and creates some of its most catastrophic events, like earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Map of Earth's principal tectonic plates. Earth's lithosphere. Major and minor plates. arrows indicate direction of movement at ...

A massive 37-million-year-old underwater canyon reveals the fossil trace of an ancient Atlantic tectonic boundary.

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 handful of ancient zircon crystals found in South Africa hold the oldest evidence of subduction, a key element of plate tectonics, according to a new study published in the open access journal AGU ...

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, ...

Geoscientists have discovered a new process in plate tectonics which shows that tremendous damage occurs to areas of Earth's crust long before it should be geologically altered by known plate-boundary ...