The audience was stunned. Atwater was the first person to use the newly revealed secrets of the seafloor to explain a ...

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, ...

Earth’s plate tectonics could be a passing phase. After simulating rock and heat flow throughout a planet’s lifetime, researchers have proposed that plate tectonics is just one stage of a planet’s ...

The research reveals how one of Earth’s defining geologic features likely formed — and set the stage for the emergence of life Abigail Eisenstadt Zircons are the oldest minerals in the world and come ...

What would you put on your list of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century? General relativity? Quantum mechanics? Something to do with genetics, perhaps? One discovery that ought to be ...

The initiation of plate tectonics on Earth is a critical event in our planet’s history. The time lag between the first proto-subduction (about 4 billion years ago) and global tectonics (approximately ...

Recently, a video showing peoplecollecting marine fossils from the summit of a mountain went viral, leaving many puzzled.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Are we alone, and if so, why? So far, the search for ...

Earth's unique possession of both abundant internal heat and liquid water facilitates active plate tectonics, a process absent on other terrestrial planets. Mars, smaller than Earth, cooled rapidly, ...

A new study makes the case that the solar system’s hellish second planet once may have had plate tectonics that could have made it more hospitable to life. By Kenneth Chang Venus today is not like ...

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, ...