Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...

A chain of remote islands and underwater volcanoes between Alaska and Kamchatka has revealed a much older chapter in Earth's ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

Subduction zones are cornerstone components of plate tectonics, with one plate sliding beneath another back into Earth's mantle. But the very beginning of this process—subduction initiation—remains ...

Utrecht University geologist Suzanna van de Lagemaat has reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. Her colleagues in ...

A unique rock formation in China holds clues that tectonic plates subducted, or went underneath other plates, during the Archean eon (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), just as they do nowadays, a ...

Utrecht University PhD candidate Suzanna van de Lagemaat has reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. She reconstructed ...

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, ...

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Earthquakes usually occur along fracture zones in Earth's crust, where large tectonic plates slide past one another and become locked. Stress builds up over long periods and is suddenly released in ...

Information about past sea-level change is crucial for understanding coastal tectonic movements and seismic hazards. Locally, sediment isostatic adjustment (SIA) induced by erosional unloading and ...

Geologists have reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. The team had predicted its existence over 10 years ago based on ...