The tiny Juan de Fuca plate is largely responsible for the volcanoes that dot the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The plates make up Earth's outer shell, called the lithosphere. (This includes ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today.

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Ancient supercontinent Nuna's breakup around 1.5 billion years ago set off a chain of events that made Earth more habitable, ...

Lake Turkana in northern Kenya is often called the cradle of humankind. Home to some of the earliest hominids, its ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Based on a series of models considering how the continents were ...

A study led by researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of Adelaide has revealed how the breakup of an ...

When Earth’s ancient supercontinent Nuna broke apart, it reshaped oceans, cooled the climate, and set the stage for complex ...

In practice, there is a natural ceiling imposed by the physics of planet Earth itself. The height of mountains is a balancing act between constructive and ...

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 ...