The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

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 originated from a huge impact billions of years ...

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, ...

A global seismic study has revealed that ancient tectonic slabs buried 1,800 miles below Earth's surface are still deforming the lowermost mantle near the core-mantle boundary. Using over 16 million ...

A study proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle. The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of ...

Earth is truly unique among our Solar System’s planets. It has vast water oceans and abundant life. But Earth is also unique because it is the only planet with plate tectonics, which shaped its ...

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, ...

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 ...

Scientists present important new constraints showing that plate tectonics started relatively slow, although the early Earth's interior was much hotter than today. Writing in PNAS, scientists from ...

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model builds ...