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 ...

The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have originated from a huge impact billions of years ago. This huge collision with the Earth, thought to have occurred around 4.5 ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Plate tectonics may have played a larger role in the evolution of life on Earth than we ...

It has been thought that plate tectonics were a significant factor in the shaping of our planet and the evolution of life. Mars and Venus don't experience such movements of crustal plates, but then ...

Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...

Carbon released from Earth's spreading tectonic plates, not volcanoes, may have triggered major transitions between ancient ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

Researchers used small zircon crystals to unlock information about magmas and plate tectonic activity in early Earth. The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely ...

Earth is special in that it has two things that other terrestrial planets don’t: an abundance of internal heat, from when our planet was molten rock, and liquid water. To understand why our planet is ...

New finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that 'when we're looking for exoplanets that ...