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 ...

Jan. 18 (UPI) --New mantle convection models show heat from Earth's core is a driving factor of plate tectonics. Until now, scientists believed cooling was the primary factor. Current tectonics models ...

If you’ve ever felt the earth shudder beneath your feet during an earthquake, you’re no stranger to the effects of Earth’s ever-roaming tectonic plates. While scientists have linked the movements of ...

What causes lava to gush from volcanoes in plumes of liquid fire or the ground to shake like the world is ending? Plate tectonics. What causes plate tectonics? Not so fast. Until now, the answer was ...

If Yale researcher Jun Korenaga is correct, then habitable planets may be rarer than previously thought. According to a recently published paper, the ability of Earthlike planets to self-regulate ...

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth’s mantle flows beneath the ocean’s tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal ...

The current Martian mantle contains a multitude of heterogeneous fragments of kilometer-scale sizes. These heterogeneities are believed to be the result of differentiation processes dating back ...

It’s right there in the name: “plate tectonics.” Geology’s organizing theory hinges on plates—thin, interlocking pieces of Earth’s rocky skin. Plates’ movements explain earthquakes, volcanoes, ...

Remember back in fourth grade when your mind was blown that the continents and oceans are all actually moving, very slowly, and that they used to be in different forms? The theory of plate tectonics ...

Scientists present important new constraints showing that plate tectonics started relatively slow, although the early Earth's interior was much hotter than today. Writing in PNAS, scientists from ...