From the summit of Mount Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench, Earth’s surface reveals dramatic extremes. This video ...

Plate tectonics reveals how Earth’s surface is constantly in motion, and how its features — volcanoes, earthquakes, ocean basins and mountains — are intrinsically linked to its hot interior. The ...

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 ...

Relative plate motions and plate boundary geometries are from Cao et al. (2024), with plate motions placed in a mantle reference frame. Continents are light grey, with continental margins shown in ...

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life. When you ...

On Earth, the land moves. Over millions of years, continents shift and the entire surface of the planet reshapes itself. The driver of all this is plate tectonics: Earth’s surface is divided into ...

Graphic depicting the last 1.6 billion years of Earth’s tectonic history. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-54700-x How did complex life emerge and evolve on the Earth and ...

Science has made great progress in telling the story of how Earth was formed more than four and a half billion years ago. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and plate tectonics shape the landscape. But ...

Plate tectonics give rise to Earth's mountain ranges, earthquakes and the long-term movement of continents, and may even have provided the right conditions for life on Earth. But as far as we know, no ...

The “Boring Billion” is an informal description of a billion-year-period of Earth history (1.8 billion to 800 million years ago) where tectonics, climate, and biological evolution remained ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...