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 ...

At some point between 300 million and 1 billion years ago, a large cosmic object smashed into the planet Venus, leaving a crater more than 170 miles in diameter. A team of Brown University researchers ...

Map of Earth's principal tectonic plates. Earth's lithosphere. Major and minor plates. arrows indicate direction of movement at plate boundaries. Vector illustration. Billions of years ago, Earth's ...

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth’s mantle flows beneath the ocean’s tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth ...

TORONTO, ON – Just like honey slowly dripping from a spoon, parts of the rocky outermost layer of Earth’s shell are continuously sinking into the more fluid layer of the planet’s mantle over the ...

There are 35 large Archean cratons around the world that form the geologic core of tectonic plates. Because they’re located at the interior of plates, these landmasses often remain unaltered over the ...

It has been thought that plate tectonics were a significant factor in the shaping of our planet and the evolution of life. Mars and Venus don't experience such movements of crustal plates, but then ...

Earth is special in that it has two things that other terrestrial planets don’t: an abundance of internal heat, from when our planet was molten rock, and liquid water. To understand why our planet is ...

This artist’s concept of the large Quetzalpetlatl Corona located in Venus’ southern hemisphere depicts active volcanism and a subduction zone, where the foreground crust plunges into the planet’s ...