The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor.

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today. Scientists are unlocking secrets about how plate tectonics forged our modern world ...

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life. When you ...

The map highlights in yellow the zones of the Pacific Plate that are being pulled apart by the sinking tectonic plate along the Pacific Ring of Fire.

The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

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 ...

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

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Margarete Jadamec, a University at Buffalo expert on Alaskan plate tectonics, is available to discuss the 7.0 earthquake in the Anchorage area, and how the region’s unique geology ...

Scientists are among the millions of die-hard Game of Thrones fans digesting the show’s finale today. The striking landscape of Game of Thrones has led some researchers to build climate simulations ...

WASHINGTON — Puerto Rico has felt hundreds of aftershocks after the Jan. 7 magnitude 6.4 earthquake. And throughout history, earthquakes are not an unheard-of occurrence on the island. This is because ...

A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction zone, reshaping how I understand the tectonic engine of the West Coast.