The East African Rift stretches more than 3,000 kilometers, slicing from Ethiopia’s Red Sea coast through Kenya and down to ...

Across East Africa, from Ethiopia’s coasts on the Red Sea down to Mozambique, a long line on the map shows where the ...

Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet's history, challenging current theories about plate tectonics. Researchers have made a new discovery that changes ...

Earth's crust today has a surprisingly similar composition to the planet's first outer shell, or "protocrust," new research finds. This early rocky shell featured chemical signatures previously ...

ANN ARBOR—As anyone with a smattering of geological knowledge knows, Earth’s crust is made up of plates that creep over the planet’s surface at a rate of several inches per year. But why do they move ...

Rocks in Australia preserve evidence that plates in Earth’s crust were moving 3.5 billion years ago, a finding that pushes back the beginnings of plate tectonics by hundreds of millions of years.

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...

The Earth with the upper mantle revealed. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a previously unknown layer of partly molten rock in a key region just below the tectonic ...

Earth is the only known planet which has plate tectonics today. The constant movement of these giant slabs of rock over the planet’s magma creates continents – and may have even helped create life. In ...