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 ...

Researchers used small zircon crystals to unlock information about magmas and plate tectonic activity in early Earth. The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely ...

On Earth, the land moves. Over millions of years, continents shift and the entire surface of the planet reshapes itself. The driver of all this is plate tectonics: Earth’s surface is divided into ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

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, ...

Plate tectonics is a highly complex phenomenon that underpins almost every geological process and our understanding of Earth. Increasingly sophisticated computers and statistical approaches, including ...

Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earth’s surface is constantly shifting, shaped by the slow but powerful movement of tectonic plates. While some plates have ...

The theory of Plate tectonics – developed from Alfred Wegener’s theory of Continental Drift to explain the movement of the continents – has become the prevailing theory underpinning our understanding ...