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 ...

A handful of ancient zircon crystals found in South Africa hold the oldest evidence of subduction, a key element of plate tectonics, according to a new study published in the open access journal AGU ...

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 ...

From time to time, when Earth's tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new modeling study published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, R. Dietmar ...

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 ...

For decades, scientists have accepted a particular theory regarding the evolution Earth’s plate tectonics, but a recent study published in Nature Geoscience could defy this as a team of researchers ...

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 ...

Identification of the oldest preserved pieces of Earth's crust in southern Greenland has provided evidence of active plate tectonics as early as 3.8 billion years ago, according to a report by an ...

Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...

(CN) — Think the first world wide web is a recent development? Think again. Billions of years before the internet was created, a natural process involving tectonic plates became a global network that ...