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, ...

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 ...

A handful of ancient zircon crystals found in South Africa hold the oldest evidence of subduction, a key element of plate tectonics, according to a new study published in the open access journal AGU ...

The Earth’s crust is constantly changing. It’s currently made of many huge rock slabs called tectonic plates—seven major ones along with many more smaller plates—that fit together like puzzle pieces ...

Minerals suggest large blocks of Earth’s crust moved around as early as 3.2 billion years ago Modern plate tectonics may have gotten under way as early as 3.2 billion years ago, about 400 million ...

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 ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Without plate tectonics, our planet wouldn’t have continents, mountains, and possibly even life itself. New evidence suggests this geological process began at least 3.2 billion years ago, a ...

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 ...

Scientists provide new evidence that modern plate tectonics, a defining feature of Earth and its unique ability to support life, emerged roughly 3.6 billion years ago. The study uses zircons, the ...