Great things can come from failure when it comes to geology. The Midcontinent rift formed about 1.1 billion years ago and ...

A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction zone, reshaping how I understand the tectonic engine of the West Coast.

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

Three huge tectonic plates meet at the Mendocino triple junction off the coast of northern California, and a new study ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

This groundbreaking research offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Earth’s tectonic evolution from 1.8 Ga to the present, bridging critical gaps in pre-Pangean plate dynamics. By merging three ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Are we alone, and if so, why? So far, the search for ...

The East African Rift System is a newly forming plate tectonic boundary at which the African continent is being separated into several plates. According to GPS data, one of those, the Victoria ...

Slow earthquakes are long-period earthquakes that are not so dangerous alone, but are able to trigger more destructive earthquakes. Their origins lie in tectonic plate boundaries where one plate ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...