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 ...

At some point between 300 million and 1 billion years ago, a large cosmic object smashed into the planet Venus, leaving a crater more than 170 miles in diameter. A team of Brown University researchers ...

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 ...

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 ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth ...

Earth's unique possession of both abundant internal heat and liquid water facilitates active plate tectonics, a process absent on other terrestrial planets. Mars, smaller than Earth, cooled rapidly, ...

Venus may not have had Earth-like tectonic plates for the last billion years, according to the results of a new study. Instead, the planet, which is often referred to as Earth’s twin, may be covered ...

Plate tectonics theory posits that Earth's outer shell is subdivided into plates that move relative to each other, concentrating most activity along the boundaries between plates, yet the scientific ...

Mead crater, the largest impact basin on Venus, is encircled by two rocky rings, which provide valuable information about the planet's lithosphere. At some point between 300 million and 1 billion ...

A study of a giant impact crater on Venus suggests that its lithosphere was too thick to have had Earth-like plate tectonics, at least for much of the past billion years. At some point between 300 ...