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 ...

But he says the basic concept, that plate tectonics emerged intermittently, is “a good idea, and one to test.” Alexandra Witze is a contributing correspondent for Science News. Based in ...

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.

New research hints that plate tectonics began earlier than 4 billion years ago — not long after Earth had formed. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...