Deep within the Earth’s mantle, rhythmic pulses of hot lava are emerging on the surface, offering a rare glimpse into the ...

Scientists found a rhythmic mantle plume beneath Ethiopia is slowly tearing Africa apart - hinting at the birth of a new ...

I just returned home from an adventure in Ecuador, the highlight was two weeks on a boat exploring the Galápagos Islands. As an earth scientist, there’s always a geologic story wherever I visit, but ...

They represent the least well-studied of the three major plate boundaries, which include divergent boundaries, like East Africa, where plates move apart forming new crust; and convergent ...

In plate tectonics, the Earth’s lithosphere, the outermost layer composed of the crust and upper mantle, is divided into sizable rocky plates. These plates rest on the asthenosphere, a semi ...

But more suspect that plate tectonics emerged earlier, in the Archean eon, which ran from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. The evidence is based largely on chemical analyses of rocks.

Hawley, however, was distracted by a peculiar region below central Oregon where it appears that a chunk of the Juan de Fuca plate is missing. He wasn’t the first to notice this gap, but it ...

As the name suggests, divergent boundaries are tectonic boundaries where plates "diverge" or are tugged apart. This motion creates giant troughs on land, such as the East Africa Rift.

Plate tectonics is unique in that the entire surface is divided into shells, or plates that have sharp boundaries. On Earth, these boundaries are known as subduction zones, where plates are forced ...

Such mountain ranges form when two tectonic plates collide and Earth's crust buckles, or one plate dips under the other, thrusting the overtopping plate upward. Underwater, though, submarine mountains ...

Nearly all tectonic action occurs at plate boundaries. Smaller plates may get worn away completely over time, but the centers, or cratons, of larger continental plates remain stable — they include the ...