Last Sunday, May 24, marked the 109th birthday of geologist Harry Hammond Hess, who discovered the primary mechanism of plate tectonics. That's the process through that determined how the shape of ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, my colleagues and I have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s ...

Investigating the causes and consequences of volcanoes and featuring case studies from the Canary Islands, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Iceland. Below Earth’s surface, in the upper mantle, ...

It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

Some great ideas shake up the world. For centuries, the outermost layer of Earth was thought to be static, rigid, locked in place. But the theory of plate tectonics has rocked this picture of the ...

Plate tectonics is the theory used to explain the structure of the Earth’s crust and many of the associated phenomenon. The rigid lithosphere is split into 15 major plates that slowly move on top of ...

Craig O'Neill receives funding from the ARC. Plate tectonics may be a phase in the evolution of planets that has implications for the habitability of exoplanets, according to new research published ...