From the deepest ocean trench to the tallest mountain, plate tectonics explains the features and movement of Earth's surface in the present and the past. The theory of plate tectonics was ...

With these basic ingredients, single proto-subduction zones could build and propagate plate tectonics by accumulating weak zones to be inherited as passive plate boundaries. The time to localize ...

Yet success is no guarantee against a midlife crisis, and so it is that half a century after the basic mechanisms of plate tectonics were first elucidated, geologists are confronting surprising ...

If basic life were already present nearly half a billion years before tectonics, as implied by this study, it raises interesting questions about how life might survive in a plate-tectonic-less world.

If plate tectonics, oceans and continents are rare on worlds throughout the universe, that is. Alien life capable of communicating across interstellar space might not be able to evolve if its home ...

The Earth’s crust is divided into large, rigid tectonic plates that move over time, driving earthquakes, volcanic activity, ...

Vast, quasi-circular features on Venus's surface may reveal that the planet has ongoing tectonics, according to new research ...

However, Venus may have once had tectonic plate movements that are similar to what occurred during Earth’s early days. The new finding gives astronomers some novel scenarios to evaluate ...

Researchers have discovered the world's oldest known arc-slicing fault in Australia, intensifying the debate over the origins of plate tectonics. When you purchase through links on our site ...

Computer simulations suggest that a collision with another planetary object early in Earth’s history may have provided the heat to set off plate tectonics. By Lucas Joel Some 4.5 billion years ...

The movement of the plates creates three types of tectonic boundaries: convergent, where plates move into one another; divergent, where plates move apart; and transform, where plates move sideways ...