New research reveals that Central Asia’s rugged terrain was molded by the vanished Tethys Ocean, millions of years before the ...

By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San Andreas fault meets the Cascadia subduction zone, an area that could give rise ...

New research challenges conventional wisdom by demonstrating that mid-ocean ridges and continental rifts, not volcanic ...

Carbon released from Earth's spreading tectonic plates, not volcanoes, may have triggered major transitions between ancient ...

Tiny earthquakes have revealed potentially deadly hidden faults beneath California. By tracking swarms of very small tremors, ...

The Iberian Peninsula is undergoing a slow but measurable clockwise rotation, driven by tectonic forces far beneath the surface.

Three of the great tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust meet at the Mendocino Triple Junction, off the Humboldt ...

This piece is part of a special project on deep time examining what the Western U.S. was like thousands, millions and even billions of years ago, and how that history is still visible and ...

We’ve known for a while that Mars was once a wet world. But there’s always been a geological puzzle regarding how and where that water moved. On Earth, rivers are largely driven by plate tectonics.

The tectonic plates are among the most powerful forces on Earth, exerting tremendous influence over every single life that unfolds on this planet. They are both creators and destroyers, capable of ...