The rocks didn’t look like much from the outside. Scattered across a remote stretch of western Australia called North Pole ...

The history of Earth is written on the great tablets of tectonic plates. The motions of plates shaped land masses, formed ...

Scientists have found the oldest direct evidence for tectonic motion on Earth by more than half a billion years ...

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 ...

Until recently, researchers believed only one planet in our solar system had plate tectonics: Earth. But in a recent study, Brown University researchers used atmospheric modeling to show that Venus, ...

Direct evidence of the movements of tectonic plates has been found in some of the world’s oldest rocks, in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. This evidence dates back 3.5 billion years; the ...

Early in Earth’s history, the heat left over from the collision that formed the Moon left its surface an ocean of magma. As it cooled, its crust was frequently shattered by massive impacts that ...

Scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence yet that Earth’s tectonic plates were on the move 3.5 billion years ago.

Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth ...

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, ...

From continental drift to plate tectonics / Naomi Oreskes -- Stripes on the sea floor / Ron Mason -- Reversals of fortune / Frederick J. Vine -- The zebra pattern / Lawrence W. Morley -- On board the ...