Scientists warn that the plate beneath Gibraltar arc will begin to shift toward the Atlantic within 20 million years.

One of Earth’s defining features is its plate tectonics, a phenomenon that shapes the planet’s surface and creates some of its most catastrophic events, like earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic ...

As an undergrad at MIT in the 1950s, Lynn Sykes ’59, SM ’60, became interested in the theory of continental drift, which held that the world’s great landmasses had wandered across Earth over time. The ...

A new study introduces a novel way for tectonic plates — massive sheets of rock that jostle for position in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle — to bend and sink. It’s a bit of planetary Pilates that ...

New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth's crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at ...

There are many open questions about how our planet formed 4.55 billion years ago: When did plate tectonics start? When did the Earth's mantle begin to vigorously circulate in a process called ...

Lake Turkana in northern Kenya is often called the cradle of humankind. Home to some of the earliest hominids, its fossil-rich basin has helped scientists piece together the story of human evolution.