After NOAA abruptly cut funding to the lab that’s been monitoring seismic activity for more than 25 years, nine stations ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through the ...

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 ...

Scientists have found evidence of plate tectonics on Jupiter's moon Europa. This indicates the first sign of this type of surface-shifting geological activity on a world other than Earth. "Europa may ...

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

A long-standing question regarding the strength of olivine, the primary component of Earth's mantle, has now been answered. This study has implications for how we understand now tectonic plates form ...

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 ...

Matt Benoit is a journalist based in Bellingham, Washington. His work has appeared in several Washington newspapers, the Pacific Northwest Inlander, Salish Current, WhatcomTalk.com and Freethink Media ...

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...

The resultant change in shape due to the stress is called strain (stores the energy input – this stored energy is called strain energy) The strain continues to build up in the rocks until the fault ...

Remember back in fourth grade when your mind was blown that the continents and oceans are all actually moving, very slowly, and that they used to be in different forms? The theory of plate tectonics ...