If the solar system’s hottest world, once had plate tectonics, maybe it was also capable of sustaining life long ago. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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 ...

On Earth, the land moves. Over millions of years, continents shift and the entire surface of the planet reshapes itself. The driver of all this is plate tectonics: Earth’s surface is divided into ...

There is something strange about Earth. A few billion years ago, a process started here that we have never seen anywhere else. It completely reshaped the planet’s surface and its carbon cycle, ...

His framework offered a new way to think about continental drift and revolutionized the study of earthquakes, volcanoes and evolution. By Clay Risen W. Jason Morgan, who in 1967 developed the theory ...

Plate tectonics is a highly complex phenomenon that underpins almost every geological process and our understanding of Earth. Increasingly sophisticated computers and statistical approaches, including ...

Plate tectonics describes the movement and interaction of tectonic plates on Earth's surface. This movement is driven by the very slow creeping motion of Earth's mantle, called convection, which carry ...

The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have originated from a huge impact billions of years ago. This huge collision with the Earth, thought to have occurred around 4.5 ...

William Jason Morgan, a leading scholar of plate tectonics and mantle movements, died on July 31 in his sleep, at the home he shared with his daughter and her family. He was 87. Morgan, Princeton ...

Earth’s outer shell suffered a catastrophic break on 6 February last year, when a major fault came to life in southern Turkey. The Anatolian peninsula suddenly lurched to the southwest by as much as ...

A new study presented at the 2025 EPSC/DPS Joint Meeting proposes that the rarity of specific geological and atmospheric conditions necessary for technologically advanced life significantly limits the ...