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 ...

At some point between 300 million and 1 billion years ago, a large cosmic object smashed into the planet Venus, leaving a crater more than 170 miles in diameter. A team of Brown University researchers ...

A study of a giant impact crater on Venus suggests that its lithosphere was too thick to have had Earth-like plate tectonics, at least for much of the past billion years. At some point between 300 ...

The heat transport and lithospheric dynamics of early Earth are currently explained by plate tectonic and vertical tectonic models, but these do not offer a global synthesis consistent with the ...

Mead crater, the largest impact basin on Venus, is encircled by two rocky rings, which provide valuable information about the planet's lithosphere. At some point between 300 million and 1 billion ...

"Knowing what a chicken looks like and what all the chickens before it looked like doesn't help us to understand the egg," says Taras Gerya. The ETH Professor of Geophysics uses this metaphor to ...

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 ...

It is common knowledge that the Earth's rigid upper layer called lithosphere is composed of moving plates. But just what mechanism first set plate tectonics into motion still remains a mystery.

It is common knowledge that the Earth's rigid upper layer called lithosphere is composed of moving plates. But just what mechanism first set plate tectonics into motion still remains a mystery. A team ...

“In the grand scheme of things, plate tectonics is a young theory,” says Brian Savage, a seismologist at the University of Rhode Island. “The plate-tectonic theory is 50 or 60 years old. That’s not ...