When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Plate tectonics may have played a larger role in the evolution of life on Earth than we ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

Climate change is usually associated with changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but our planet's surface also plays a major ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Scientists have traditionally focused on volcanic arcs as the main natural source of atmospheric carbon dioxide. These form ...

Seismic tremors reveal a shallow fragment of ancient tectonic plate beneath Northern California, helping explain damaging ...

An underwater spring is gushing water into the ocean at unprecedented levels giving researchers additional insights into plate tectonics but not — despite some news reports — any indications of an ...

Learn about the movement of tectonic plates off the coast of northern California, a process that could incite major ...

New finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that 'when we're looking for exoplanets that ...

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 ...