A study led by Prof. Yong-Fei Zheng at University of Science and Technology of China focused on the development of tectonic processes along convergent plate margins through inspection of recent ...

A unique rock formation in China holds clues that tectonic plates subducted, or went underneath other plates, during the Archean eon (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), just as they do nowadays, a ...

On present-day Earth, plate subduction continuously modifies the chemical composition of the convecting mantle, and various mantle sources linked to these processes have been widely studied. However, ...

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 ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...

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 ...

An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets. Using advanced numerical models, the team systematically classified for the ...

Until recently, researchers believed only one planet in our solar system had plate tectonics: Earth. But in a recent study, Brown University researchers used atmospheric modeling to show that Venus, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. A new study, using a combination of old models, new geophysical ...