Tectonic plates — which divide Earth’s crust and reshape our planet in an ongoing, dynamic process — may be the key to supporting life. In fact, because Earth is the only planet known to be home to ...

Our planet is in constant flux. Tectonic plates—the large slabs of rock that divide Earth’s crust so that it looks like a cracked eggshell—jostle about in fits and starts that continuously reshape our ...

A study on tectonic plates that converge on the Tibetan Plateau has shown that Earth's fault lines are far weaker and the ...

A gravity gradient model of the central Indian Ocean shows the junction of the African tectonic plate (left), the Indo-Australian plate (right) and the Antarctic plate (bottom). Credit: Scripps ...

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but at least there’s now a map to get you there. The map is the first to show the whereabouts of almost 100 massive remnants of what were once ...

Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around 3 billion years ago. To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to ...

A high-resolution map of Mars's entire magnetic field provides new evidence that Earth-like plate tectonics - great crustal plates pulling apart and crashing together - underpin the red planet's ...

Rocks in Australia preserve evidence that plates in Earth’s crust were moving 3.5 billion years ago, a finding that pushes back the beginnings of plate tectonics by hundreds of millions of years.

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...