Earthquakes and volcanism occur as a result of plate tectonics. The movement of tectonic plates themselves is largely driven by the process known as subduction. The question of how new active ...

Ancient rocks on the coast of Oman that were once driven deep down toward Earth's mantle may reveal new insights into subduction, an important tectonic process that fuels volcanoes and creates ...

Vast, quasi-circular features on Venus's surface may reveal that the planet has ongoing tectonics, according to new research based on data gathered more than 30 years ago by NASA's Magellan mission.

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 ...

Eastern Africa's Turkana Rift is both a hotbed for fossil discoveries of our earliest ancestors and a literal hotbed of ...

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled with natural fluctuations in the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Over the past century, humans have pushed CO₂ ...

Mountain building, also known as orogenesis, is a geological process that involves the formation and uplift of large, elevated landforms, known as mountains. The term "orogenesis" comes from Greek ...

Evaluation of landforms, soils, and deposits formed by active tectonics is providing basic data necessary for long-term earthquake prediction, seismic-hazard evaluation, and probabilistic seismic-risk ...

Geoscientists have discovered a new process in plate tectonics which shows that tremendous damage occurs to areas of Earth's crust long before it should be geologically altered by known plate-boundary ...