The spread of the ocean floor, as tectonic plates spread apart, is known but hard to observe. Scientists have now documented ...

Bathymetry of the seafloor around the Southeast Indian Rift where two tectonic plates abruptly opened a portal to the ...

Water may have been shaping Earth’s deep interior far earlier than many geologists thought. In rocks more than 3 billion years old from Western Australia, a research team found chemical signs that ...

In the 45°C heat of the midday April sun, I swing my sledgehammer into the terracotta-varnished lobes of pillow basalt ...

Earlier study of the region had shown that the spreading in the area occurs at an average rate of a bit over 60 millimeters a ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The plate tectonics that determine the shape of our continents may have ...

The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make ...

Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...

At the boundaries between tectonic plates, narrow rifts can form as Earth's crust slowly pulls apart. But how, exactly, does this rifting happen? Does pressure from magma rising from belowground force ...