Seismic tremors reveal a shallow fragment of ancient tectonic plate beneath Northern California, helping explain damaging ...

Our planet has experienced dramatic climate shifts throughout its history, oscillating between freezing "icehouse" periods ...

Carbon released from Earth's spreading tectonic plates, not volcanoes, may have triggered major transitions between ancient ...

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 ...

A hidden chunk of an ancient tectonic plate is stuck to the Pacific Ocean floor and sliding under North America, complicating ...

By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...

Scientists have traditionally focused on volcanic arcs as the main natural source of atmospheric carbon dioxide. These form ...

Earth’s crust may have gone on the move roughly 3.8 billion years ago. “Earth is actually quite distinct to other planets, in that it has plate tectonics,” says study coauthor Nadja Drabon, a ...

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 ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.