All around the world, from the Red Sea to the deep ocean ridges of the Atlantic, lurk more than a dozen geological misfits.

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Earth's surface is covered by more than a dozen tectonic plates, and in subduction zones around the world—including the ...

The first ruptures in early Earth’s skin formed because of the weakness of rock minerals merely a millimeter wide, two scientists propose. The small minerals’ behavior created boundaries defining ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Map of Earth's principal tectonic plates. Earth's lithosphere. Major and minor plates. arrows indicate direction of movement at ...

It turns out that continental breakups are just as messy as human ones, with the events leaving fragments scattered far from home ...

Microscopic zircon crystals discovered in Western Australia suggest that Earth may have had continental crust as early as 4.4 ...

Scientists are constantly on a mission to untangle how Earth alone among the planets was able to evolve complex life. We know that Earth's past internal movements of the tectonic plates under our feet ...

The Pacific and Australian plates collide and interact in complex ways around New Zealand. Electrical resistivity data reveal that subduction-zone fluids exert an important influence on deformation in ...

Given that all of the Hawaiian Islands were created by volcanic activity, it is somewhat surprising that only one of the islands possesses any active volcanoes. Why did the volcanoes that built the ...

The emergence of plate tectonics is arguably Earth’s defining moment, the authors of a new Nature paper write. Out of all the planets we’ve looked at carefully, Earth is the only one that has a hard ...

A new study suggests that plate tectonics -- a scientific theory that divides the earth into large chunks of crust that move slowly over hot viscous mantle rock -- could have been active from the ...