A hidden chunk of an ancient tectonic plate is stuck to the Pacific Ocean floor and sliding under North America, complicating ...

By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San ...

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, drive the world’s most devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. How do these danger zones come to be? A study in Geology presents ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The modern understanding of the plate tectonic cycle predicts that remnants of submerged plates will be ...

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 ...

A new study from scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the University of Chicago sheds light on a hotly contested debate in Earth sciences: when did plate subduction ...

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 ...

Geophysicists can use a new model to explain the behavior of a tectonic plate sinking into a subduction zone in the Earth's mantle: the plate becomes weak and thus more deformable when mineral grains ...

At subduction zones, where one plate bends deep beneath another, the sinking plate can carry more than an ocean's worth of water into the mantle over billions of years. A new subduction zone south of ...

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 ...

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 ...

A Brown University study provides new evidence that the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa may have plate tectonics similar to those on Earth. The presence of plate tectonic activity could have ...