A hidden shard of ancient crust has been detected where California’s San Andreas system collides with the Cascadia subduction zone, reshaping how I understand the tectonic engine of the West Coast.

Three huge tectonic plates meet at the Mendocino triple junction off the coast of northern California, and a new study ...

Memorizing seven continents feels settled, like learning the alphabet. A new study argues the ground rules are less tidy.

Some great ideas shake up the world. For centuries, the outermost layer of Earth was thought to be static, rigid, locked in place. But the theory of plate tectonics has rocked this picture of the ...

By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San ...

The Rocky Mountains have always looked like a geological non sequitur, a towering spine of peaks sitting far from the ...

This groundbreaking research offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Earth’s tectonic evolution from 1.8 Ga to the present, bridging critical gaps in pre-Pangean plate dynamics. By merging three ...

Slow earthquakes are long-period earthquakes that are not so dangerous alone, but are able to trigger more destructive earthquakes. Their origins lie in tectonic plate boundaries where one plate ...

In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. The plates move together and apart at the speed of fingernail growth, and the video ...

If you think about mountain ranges like the Andes or the Himalayas, you can come up with multiple factors that must affect their size and shape. There’s the collision of tectonic plates that squeezes ...