Some great ideas shake up the world. For centuries, the outermost layer of Earth was thought to be static, rigid, locked in place. But the theory of plate tectonics has rocked this picture of the ...

A massive 37-million-year-old underwater canyon reveals the fossil trace of an ancient Atlantic tectonic boundary.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Are we alone, and if so, why? So far, the search for ...

The quest to discover what drove one of the most important evolutionary events in the history of life on Earth has taken a new, fascinating twist. The quest to discover what drove one of the most ...

This groundbreaking research offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Earth’s tectonic evolution from 1.8 Ga to the present, bridging critical gaps in pre-Pangean plate dynamics. By merging three ...

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

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 ...

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model builds ...

image: This shows the mechanisms for the recent Virginia and Oklahoma earthquakes that occurred within the North American plate, and the 2010 Haiti Earthquake that occurred on the plate boundary ...

Generally speaking, it’s easy enough to make sense of the last few million years of climate patterns—the world looked much as it does today, so changes in greenhouse gas concentrations or ocean ...