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 ...

Earthquakes and volcanism occur as a result of plate tectonics. The movement of tectonic plates themselves is largely driven by the process known as subduction. The question of how new active ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...

It was a groundbreaking discovery. Scientists have found previously concealed fault lines along California’s north coast, sparking concerns that we could be drastically underestimating the earthquake ...

Ancient rocks on the coast of Oman that were once driven deep down toward Earth's mantle may reveal new insights into subduction, an important tectonic process that fuels volcanoes and creates ...

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 ...

Geologists have uncovered the remains of a massive tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean, a plate that had been hidden for over 160 million years. Known as Pontus, this tectonic giant once covered ...

A study on tectonic plates that converge on the Tibetan Plateau has shown that Earth's fault lines are far weaker and the ...

For the first time in history, scientists have observed the rupture of a tectonic plate in a subduction zone in real time. The study, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, was ...

Venus, a scorching wasteland of a planet according to scientists, may have once had tectonic plate movements similar to those believed to have occurred on early Earth, a new study found. PROVIDENCE, R ...

At the boundaries between tectonic plates, narrow rifts can form as Earth's crust slowly pulls apart. But how, exactly, does this rifting happen? Does pressure from magma rising from belowground force ...

Learn more about how Earth’s crust unzipped beneath the Atlantic Ocean, creating a giant underwater canyon.