See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have ...

The first direct evidence of how and when tectonic plates move into the deepest reaches of the Earth is published in Nature today. Scientists hope their description of how plates collide with one ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth’s mantle flows beneath the ocean’s tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal ...

Map of the Earth showing tectonic plates. Early Earth likely had no plate tectonics, but a solid outer crust with no tectonic activity covered the entire planet. After being broken up by convection ...

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 ...

An artist's render of Mars. (Kevin M. Gill/Flickr/CC BY 2.0) For decades, our picture of Mars was of a dead desert world. Its magnetic field exists only in sparse patches. Its lakes and rivers have ...