A hidden chunk of an ancient tectonic plate is stuck to the Pacific Ocean floor and sliding under North America, complicating earthquake risk at the Cascadia subduction zone.

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

A study of the East African Rift reveals that ancient heating and dehydration can strengthen continental crust, reshaping how ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...

The outermost layer of the Earth is the crust. The continents sit on continental crust, which covers about 41 percent of the surface of the Earth; the remainder is covered by oceanic crust. The ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The modern understanding of the plate tectonic cycle predicts that remnants of submerged plates will be found near subduction ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Map showing the pontus plate which vanished 20 million years ago. A long-lost tectonic plate that once underpinned what is today ...

The face of the Earth has changed drastically over its life, with plates shifting and sinking. Now, geologists at the University of Houston claim to have found the remains of an ancient tectonic plate ...

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