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 ...

An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets. Using advanced numerical models, the team systematically classified for the ...

About 150 million years ago, a massive tectonic mega-plate stretched across the Earth, spanning roughly a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Its jagged contours ran all the way through the ...

A new study introduces a novel way for tectonic plates — massive sheets of rock that jostle for position in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle — to bend and sink. It’s a bit of planetary Pilates that ...

Watch the Earth's tectonic plates grow, shrink, and jostle for position in this new model of the last billion years on the ...

A new study suggests that tiny, mineral grains — squeezed and mixed over millions of years — set in motion the chain of events that plunge massive tectonic plates deep into the Earth’s interior. The ...

Geophysicists can use a new model to explain the behavior of a tectonic plate sinking into a subduction zone in the Earth's mantle: the plate becomes weak and thus more deformable when mineral grains ...

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 ...

Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost tectonic plate that may have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million years ago. The plate, dubbed Resurrection, has long been ...