While recently driving through the Arbuckle Mountains — at least in Oklahoma, we call them mountains — as so many times before, I was impressed by all the exposed geological ...

Ocean floor map interactive: Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has released a free, scrollable version of the 1977 Heezen-Tharp World Ocean Floor map, the panorama that helped prove plate ...

Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don’t agree on how they formed. “The continents started appearing around ...

New research finds the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults in Southern California are more stressed now than at any time in 1,000 years, raising long-term earthquake risk for millions. Scientists ...

(CNN) — Sub-Saharan Africa could split up in a few million years, and scientists believe they might be witnessing the early stages of this geological process. The split would occur along the Kafue ...

Scientists have discovered a long hidden plate boundary near the east coast of Africa that dates back about 180 million years. Scientists have identified a 310-mile tectonic plate boundary near East ...

Earth’s system of plate tectonics, in which individual plates move and collide, is unique and consequential to the planet’s evolution. However, the origins of plate tectonics are unclear. Shane ...

An earthquake-generating chunk of tectonic plate has been discovered beneath Northern California. It’s attached to the bottom of the North American plate like gum stuck to a shoe. Using abundant, tiny ...

“If we don’t understand the underlying tectonic processes, it’s hard to predict the seismic hazard,” said co-author Amanda Thomas, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis. Three of the ...

All complex life on Earth may be the result of plate tectonics tearing apart the ancient supercontinent Nuna 1.5 billion years ago, according to new research out of Australia. “Our approach shows how ...

The rare earth element niobium was likely dragged to the surface as the supercontinent Rodinia broke apart more than 800 million years ago. Credit: Artem Topchiy/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 For much of ...