Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, drive the world's most devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. How do these danger zones come to be? A study in Geology presents ...

That would have enabled more of this organic carbon—and carbonate accumulating in shallow water around Columbia—to be subducted deep into the mantle. Then comes the Boring Billion, when even mantle ...

Earth was mostly devoid of oxygen for much of its 4.5 billion year lifetime. That is, until certain processes started to allow for the eventual buildup of oxygen up to the levels we have now (around ...

A handful of ancient zircon crystals found in South Africa hold the oldest evidence of subduction, a key element of plate tectonics, according to a new study published in the open access journal AGU ...

Roughly 90 percent of the planet’s earthquakes strike along a single geologic feature: a 40,000-kilometer arc of colliding ...

On present-day Earth, plate subduction continuously modifies the chemical composition of the convecting mantle, and various mantle sources linked to these processes have been widely studied. However, ...

Earth’s crust may have gone on the move roughly 3.8 billion years ago. “Earth is actually quite distinct to other planets, in that it has plate tectonics,” says study coauthor Nadja Drabon, a ...

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland. This area is the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which move apart ~ 2.5 cm/year over millennia. When plate tectonics first emerged ...

The story offers a cohesive explanation for how Earth gained both its moon and its moving tectonic plates, and it could aid in the search for other Earthlike worlds. But others caution that it’s much ...

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 ...