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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

The ground-shaking that an earthquake generates is only a fraction of the total energy that a quake releases. A quake can ...

When we think of an earthquake, we imagine the shaking of the ground and the destruction it can cause on the surface. But ...

New research has brought seismologists one step closer to learning how earthquakes come about. Researchers used simple laboratory models to examine the forces behind the movement of plates in the ...