THAT AUTUMN, A RESEARCH VESSEL called the Glomar Challenger sailed over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to drill holes and sample sediment. Fossils within the sediment samples they retrieved gave scientists a ...

The Andes Mountains are much taller than plate tectonic theories predict they should be, a fact that has puzzled geologists for decades. Mountain-building models tend to focus on the deep-seated ...

The first direct evidence of how and when tectonic plates move into the deepest reaches of the Earth is published in Nature today. Scientists hope their description of how plates collide with one ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth ...

Scientists have uncovered one of the most exciting geological discoveries of the decade – the long-lost Pontus tectonic plate. This ancient “mega plate,” which once spanned an astonishing 15 million ...