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, ...

Researchers used small zircon crystals to unlock information about magmas and plate tectonic activity in early Earth. The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely ...

Plate tectonics is a highly complex phenomenon that underpins almost every geological process and our understanding of Earth. Increasingly sophisticated computers and statistical approaches, including ...

New finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that 'when we're looking for exoplanets that ...

From a distance, it’s not obvious that Earth is full of life. You have to get pretty close to see the biggest forests, and closer still to see the work of humans, let alone microbes. Nevertheless, ...

Plate tectonics – the drifting of continents – may have got under way at least 3.2 billion years ago and could have played a part in the evolution of life, a study of the magnetism of ancient rocks ...

It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

Make sure you pencil this into your long-term calendar, estimates place the death of plate tectonics here on Earth at 1.45 billion years from now. The existence of plate tectonics on Earth makes it ...