On Earth, continents are likely necessary to support life. Continents "float" on top of the Earth's viscous mantle, and heat from the planet's core keeps the mantle from solidifying and locking the ...

At subduction zones, where one plate bends deep beneath another, the sinking plate can carry more than an ocean's worth of water into the mantle over billions of years. A new subduction zone south of ...

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

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 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 ...

A mind-blowing fact about plate tectonics - it wasn't until the 1920s that we came up with the idea that the continents were moving, and it wasn't until the late 1960s, when seafloor spreading was ...

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.