Our planet has an outer layer made up of several plates, which move relative to one another. While we may take this knowledge for granted, this theory of plate tectonics was only formulated in the ...

Along submarine mountain ranges, the mid-ocean ridges, forces from the Earth's interior push tectonic plates apart, forming new ocean floor and thus moving continents about. However, many features of ...

The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be pretty hot compared with their surfaces. This heat, which can be caused by a number of sources — such as tidal stretching and compression, the ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

The theory of Plate tectonics – developed from Alfred Wegener’s theory of Continental Drift to explain the movement of the continents – has become the prevailing theory underpinning our understanding ...

Forces acting inside the Earth have been constantly reshaping the continents and ocean basins over millions of years. What Alfred Wegener published as an idea in 1915 has finally been accepted since ...

Alan Collins receives funding from The Australian Research Council (he is an ARC Laureate Fellow), AuScope and the MinEx CRC. He also has funding from a number of State and Federal Government bodies ...

It's the first time Earth's geologic record — information found inside rocks — has been used to create an animation of this kind. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

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 ...