A handful of ancient zircon crystals found in South Africa hold the oldest evidence of subduction, a key element of plate tectonics, according to a new study published in the open access journal AGU ...

The early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where lava fields stretch as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides tower above the clouds and stark black sand beaches outline the land. But the ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today. Scientists are unlocking secrets about how plate tectonics forged our modern world ...

When tectonic plates sink into the Earth they look like slinky snakes! That's according to a study published in Nature, which helps answer a long standing question about what happens to tectonic ...

Generally speaking, it’s easy enough to make sense of the last few million years of climate patterns—the world looked much as it does today, so changes in greenhouse gas concentrations or ocean ...

This period was anything but boring. There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact ...

As we’ve explored the Solar System, some items we’re familiar with from Earth’s geology have kept appearing in new places. Glaciers, volcanoes, and geysers have all been found on other planets and ...