The Rainbow Mountains are made of sandstone and siltstone — sedimentary rocks that form when sand and silt, respectively, are compacted and cemented together over long periods of time.

Eventually, it is understood that the Earth’s tectonic plates will come together against and form a new supercontinent, a process predicted to happen roughly 200 to 300 million years from now ...

Plate tectonics also may have enabled life to recover from devastating mass extinctions. For instance, at the end of the Permian period, a mass extinction driven by carbon-dioxide-spewing volcanic ...

Plate tectonics is a fundamental feature of Earth. As far as astronomers know, other planets may have broken-up crusts, yet ours is the only one with continually shifting plates.

New Species Emerged As Tectonic Plates Shifted: Surprise Discovery All signs of coelacanths mysteriously vanished from the fossil record, at the end of the Cretaceous period.

In line with that, a 2022 palaeomagnetic study found evidence that tectonic plates were moving horizontally at near-modern speeds 3.25 billion years ago 5.

During this period, Earth cooled enough to have a solid outer crust. Today, that crust is shaped by the grinding movements of tectonic plates, which ride on the warmer, more mobile mantle below.

Some geologists think it took a while for plate tectonics to emerge, no earlier than 2.8 billion years ago. Others argue it began much earlier (SN: 4/22/20).

Image of the tectonic plates making up the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic may start to close in around 20 million years. Elliot Lim, CIRES & NOAA/NCEI For the Atlantic to close, new subduction zones ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic ...

A new study makes the case that the solar system’s hellish second planet once may have had plate tectonics that could have made it more hospitable to life. By Kenneth Chang Venus today is not ...

Researchers analyzing ancient deposits in Australia found evidence that Earth's layers started to get mixed up — a fingerprint of plate tectonics — about 1.3 billion years after the planet formed.