The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Build mountains. Trigger volcanoes. Create new sea floor. You now have the power to change the landscape with the slightest push of your mouse. Four types of plate tectonic activity are demonstrated ...

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 ...

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 ...

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model builds ...

The Earth's longest mountain chain isn't the Andes in South America, or the Himalayas in Asia, or even North America's Rockies. It's an underwater chain of mountains 47,000 miles long. The chain runs ...