The King's Trough Complex is a several-hundred-kilometer-long, canyon-like system of trenches on the North Atlantic seafloor.

The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, my colleagues and I have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s ...

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

By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San Andreas fault meets the Cascadia subduction zone, an area that could give rise ...

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. Researchers had previously identified ...

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 ...

The Rocky Mountains have always looked like a geological non sequitur, a towering spine of peaks sitting far from the grinding edge of any modern tectonic plate boundary. For decades, geologists tried ...

A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction ...

Tiny earthquakes reveal hidden fault structures beneath Northern California, reshaping understanding of regional earthquake ...