Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

A hidden chunk of an ancient tectonic plate is stuck to the Pacific Ocean floor and sliding under North America, complicating earthquake risk at the Cascadia subduction zone.

Learn about the movement of tectonic plates off the coast of northern California, a process that could incite major ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

Map of Earth's principal tectonic plates. Earth's lithosphere. Major and minor plates. arrows indicate direction of movement at plate boundaries. Vector illustration. Billions of years ago, Earth's ...

We won’t feel it in our lifetime ...

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 ...

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 ...

Invisible earthquakes are revealing a hidden tectonic puzzle beneath California’s most dangerous fault zone.

A new study suggests that tiny, mineral grains — squeezed and mixed over millions of years — set in motion the chain of events that plunge massive tectonic plates deep into the Earth’s interior. The ...