Carbon released from Earth's spreading tectonic plates, not volcanoes, may have triggered major transitions between ancient ...

A hidden chunk of an ancient tectonic plate is stuck to the Pacific Ocean floor and sliding under North America, complicating ...

Seismic tremors reveal a shallow fragment of ancient tectonic plate beneath Northern California, helping explain damaging ...

Researchers have identified an ancient tectonic fragment, the Pioneer fragment, buried under the coast, which may exacerbate earthquake hazards associated with the San Andreas and Cascadia faults.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more. Earth’s fractured carapace of rigid, interlocking plates is unique in the solar system. Scientists increasingly ...

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 outermost layer of the Earth is the crust. The continents sit on continental crust, which covers about 41 percent of the surface of the Earth; the remainder is covered by oceanic crust. The ...

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 ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The modern understanding of the plate tectonic cycle predicts that remnants of submerged plates will be ...

A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction ...

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, ...