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 ...

Earth surface is covered with rigid plates that move, crash into each other and dive into the planet's interior. But when did this process begin? When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

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 ...

Earth’s crust may have gone on the move roughly 3.8 billion years ago. “Earth is actually quite distinct to other planets, in that it has plate tectonics,” says study coauthor Nadja Drabon, a ...

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life. When you ...

Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today. Scientists are unlocking secrets about how plate tectonics forged our modern world ...

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 ...

It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

Earth is special in that it has two things that other terrestrial planets don’t: an abundance of internal heat, from when our planet was molten rock, and liquid water. To understand why our planet is ...

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, ...

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 ...