Researchers used small zircon crystals to unlock information about magmas and plate tectonic activity in early Earth. The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely ...

New finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that 'when we're looking for exoplanets that ...

It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results.

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Researchers have produced a new estimate for the origin of Earth's ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, my colleagues and I have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s ...

Today, the entire globe is broken up into tectonic plates that are shifting past each other, causing the continents to drift slowly but steadily. But this has not always been the case. The earliest ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through 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, ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth's tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...