Recent research conducted by an international team of scientists from Utrecht University, the UK, and the US has resulted in ...

The Worcester area has evidence of the Mesoproterozoic Era, going back to the earliest known days of the present-day Earth's ...

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.

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life.

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.

If plate tectonics, oceans and continents are rare on worlds throughout the universe, that is. Alien life capable of communicating across interstellar space might not be able to evolve if its home ...

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).