Our world’s surface is a jumble of jostling tectonic plates, with new ones emerging as others are pulled under. The ongoing cycle keeps our continents in motion and drives life on Earth. But what ...

Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work covers anything from archaeology and the environment to technology and culture. Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work ...

The Andes Mountains are much taller than plate tectonic theories predict they should be, a fact that has puzzled geologists for decades. Mountain-building models tend to focus on the deep-seated ...

Based on a series of models considering how the continents were assembled over time, a team of researchers at the University of Adelaide created an updated map of Earth's tectonic plates. The map will ...

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 ...

Earth’s tectonic plates have been shaping the planet for billions of years, creating mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, and oceans. From the early days of continental drift to today’s refined models, ...

Our planet has an outer layer made up of several plates, which move relative to one another. While we may take this knowledge for granted, this theory of plate tectonics was only formulated in the ...

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. The molten layer is located about 100 ...

Latitude shapes climate in a basic but powerful way. It controls the angle of sunlight, which helps decide whether a place tends toward ice, desert, rainforest, or something in between. That simple ...

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled with natural fluctuations in the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Over the past century, humans have pushed CO₂ ...

The Mendocino Triple Junction off the coast of Northern California is the point where three tectonic plates meet. A new study reveals at least five moving pieces deep below the Earth's surface make up ...