Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model builds ...

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 ...

Plate boundaries are where the action is. A large fraction of all earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and mountain building occurs at plate boundaries. It is also where most of the people on Earth live.

Yale-led research may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in geology — namely, why do tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface, which normally shift over the course of tens to hundreds of ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

New research has found that the continents ended up where they are today because of previous plate tectonic processes that controlled how Pangaea broke apart. This hot, acidic neighbor with its ...

A team of scientists say they have uncovered evidence of a mysterious tectonic plate beneath northern Canada that some experts argue never existed. In a study published in the Geological Society of ...

Plate tectonics, the idea that the surface of the Earth is made up of plates that move apart and come back together, has been used to explain the locations of volcanoes and earthquakes since the 1960s ...

Plate tectonics is a theory of geology developed to explain the phenomenon of continental drift and is currently the theory accepted by the vast majority of scientists working in this area. In the ...

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model builds ...