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 ...

Two recent studies used seismic data from NASA's retired InSight mission to shed light on what lies beneath Mars’ surface and what that means for the planet’s history ...

A long-standing question regarding the strength of olivine, the primary component of Earth's mantle, has now been answered. This study has implications for how we understand now tectonic plates form ...

Most earthquake energy turns into heat rather than ground shaking, sometimes hot enough to melt rock in microseconds. MIT’s ...

A unique rock formation in China holds clues that tectonic plates subducted, or went underneath other plates, during the Archean eon (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), just as they do nowadays, a ...

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 ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Computational scientists and geophysicists at the University of Texas at Austin and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed new computer algorithms that for ...

A mysterious layer lies beneath Earth's massive tectonic plates. Sandwiched between two rock layers — the rigid lithosphere and the more pliable asthenosphere— this thin boundary is like the jelly in ...

Remember back in fourth grade when your mind was blown that the continents and oceans are all actually moving, very slowly, and that they used to be in different forms? The theory of plate tectonics ...

We had reached the décollement zone, the very boundary where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. In the lab, slicing open the cores revealed something else: beautifully banded colourful clays, ...

It turns out that the familiar ground-shaking is only a small portion (10%) of the total energy released. While a tiny ...