In the heart of Asia, deep underground, two huge tectonic plates are crashing into each other — a violent but slow-motion bout of geological bumper cars that over time has sculpted the soaring ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through the ...

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 ...

The tectonic plates are among the most powerful forces on Earth, exerting tremendous influence over every single life that unfolds on this planet. They are both creators and destroyers, capable of ...

Earthquakes and volcanism occur as a result of plate tectonics. The movement of tectonic plates themselves is largely driven by the process known as subduction. The question of how new active ...

At the boundaries between tectonic plates, narrow rifts can form as Earth's crust slowly pulls apart. But how, exactly, does this rifting happen? Does pressure from magma rising from belowground force ...

A new study introduces a novel way for tectonic plates — massive sheets of rock that jostle for position in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle — to bend and sink. It’s a bit of planetary Pilates that ...

TORONTO, ON - Geoscientists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Istanbul Technical University have discovered a new process in plate tectonics which shows that tremendous damage occurs to areas ...

Geological processes shape the planet Earth and are in many ways essential to our planet's habitability for life. One important geological process is plate tectonics – the drifting, colliding and ...

When tectonic plates sink into the Earth they look like slinky snakes! That's according to a study published in Nature, which helps answer a long standing question about what happens to tectonic ...