Earth’s crust may have gone on the move roughly 3.8 billion years ago. “Earth is actually quite distinct to other planets, in that it has plate tectonics,” says study coauthor Nadja Drabon, a ...

Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...

An online tool lets you trace where any latitude location on Earth was 320 million years ago, revealing how continents drift ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

The findings were buried beneath billions of years of Earth history. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Earth's constantly moving ...

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, ...

Have tectonic plates changed speed over the last 3 billion years? The answer has far-reaching implications, as plate tectonics affected everything from the supply of vital nutrients for early life to ...

Utrecht University PhD candidate Suzanna van de Lagemaat has reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. She reconstructed ...

A major geological find has been unearthed under the frozen waters of the Davis Strait, the narrow ocean channel between Baffin Island in Canada and Greenland. A combined research team from Sweden and ...

Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost tectonic plate that may have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million years ago. The plate, dubbed Resurrection, has long been ...

A geologic map of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia. The rocks exposed here range from 2.5 to 3.5 billion years ago, offering a uniquely well-preserved window into Earth's deep past. The authors ...