Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

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 ...

An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets. Using advanced numerical models, the team systematically classified for the ...

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 ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

Earth’s continental crust has grown and been reshaped over more than four billion years through the interplay of mantle dynamics, magmatic differentiation and crustal recycling. In its infancy, a ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. A plume of molten rock rising from the depths of the Earth in heartbeat ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Are we alone, and if so, why? So far, the search for ...

They were two of the strongest quakes to hit Venezuela in more than a century. Quakes of 7.0 to 7.9 magnitude are considered ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The vast stretch of ocean between the Americas and Europe may be about ...

New research by Brown University geologists confirms that the Aleutian Islands, the archipelago stretching from Alaska to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, experienced a massive geological uplift between ...