Researchers used small zircon crystals to unlock information about magmas and plate tectonic activity in early Earth. The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely ...

Earth's surface is broken up into large plates that rub against each other, causing earthquakes, volcanoes and large mountain ranges. But how unique is our planet's geology? When you purchase through ...

Generally speaking, it’s easy enough to make sense of the last few million years of climate patterns—the world looked much as it does today, so changes in greenhouse gas concentrations or ocean ...

The colossal movements of tectonic plates shape our world, influencing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere, the planet’s protective magnetic field and perhaps even the flourishing of life. Now ...

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 ...

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, ...

From a distance, it’s not obvious that Earth is full of life. You have to get pretty close to see the biggest forests, and closer still to see the work of humans, let alone microbes. Nevertheless, ...

Earth's fractured outer shell is in perpetual motion. While usually imperceptible to us surface dwellers, these pieces of a rocky jigsaw puzzle are constantly crashing together, diving beneath one ...

A new paper has revealed that tectonic activity on this planet—a unique feature in the solar system—could have been spurred by a stream of asteroid impacts. Previously, computer models have shown that ...