An exceptionally well-preserved skull from a fish which lived 384–382 million years ago helps explain how plate tectonics played a key role in the evolution of ancient bony fish which eventually led ...

On present-day Earth, plate subduction continuously modifies the chemical composition of the convecting mantle, and various mantle sources linked to these processes have been widely studied. However, ...

A study led by Prof. Yong-Fei Zheng at University of Science and Technology of China focused on the development of tectonic processes along convergent plate margins through inspection of recent ...

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 ...

For decades, scientists have accepted a particular theory regarding the evolution Earth’s plate tectonics, but a recent study published in Nature Geoscience could defy this as a team of researchers ...

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 ...

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, ...

For decades, the leading explanation for Yellowstone’s explosive volcanic history has centered on a plume of superheated rock ...

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 ...

A Brown University study provides new evidence that the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa may have plate tectonics similar to those on Earth. The presence of plate tectonic activity could have ...