It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

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 ...

The solid ground that we all live on forms a thin crust around the Earth. It’s no more than 50km thick - and it’s just the upper part of the lithosphere. Below it is the upper mantle. It’s mostly ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

Plate tectonics is the theory used to explain the structure of the Earth’s crust and many of the associated phenomenon. The rigid lithosphere is split into 15 major plates that slowly move on top of ...

Several large earthquakes have struck the Indonesian island of Lombok in the past week, with the largest quake killing at least 105 people and injuring hundreds more. Thousands of buildings are ...

New information about the extent of the 1872 Owens Valley earthquake rupture, which occurs in an area with many small and discontinuous faults, may support a hypothesis that these types of quakes ...

Craig O'Neill receives funding from the ARC. Plate tectonics may be a phase in the evolution of planets that has implications for the habitability of exoplanets, according to new research published ...

The diagram below shows the structure of the earth. In geography, taking a slice through a structure to see inside is called a cross section. Continental plates are usually quite thick (between 35 to ...