Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The modern understanding of the plate tectonic cycle predicts that remnants of submerged plates will be found near subduction ...

Our world’s surface is a jumble of jostling tectonic plates, with new ones emerging as others are pulled under. The ongoing cycle keeps our continents in motion and drives life on Earth. But what ...

Off the rugged north coast of California, one of the most seismically volatile corners of the United States is yielding a new and unsettling secret. By tracking swarms of earthquakes far too small for ...

Geophysicists can use a new model to explain the behavior of a tectonic plate sinking into a subduction zone in the Earth's mantle: the plate becomes weak and thus more deformable when mineral grains ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Mendocino Triple ...

Great things can come from failure when it comes to geology. The Midcontinent rift formed about 1.1 billion years ago and ...

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 ...

A new study introduces a novel way for tectonic plates — massive sheets of rock that jostle for position in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle — to bend and sink. It’s a bit of planetary Pilates that ...

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 ...

Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost tectonic plate that may have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million years ago. The plate, dubbed Resurrection, has long been ...

Mastermind geologists have reverse-engineered Earth's missing tectonic plate. Tectonic activity determined how continents form and how today's Earth was made. The researchers unfolded and untucked ...