Around the Balkan Peninsula, the African plate is sinking beneath the European plate. A piece of deeply submerged African ...

New research reveals the source of this carbon – and the driving forces behind it – are far more complex than previously ...

In deep Earth, rocks take up and release water all the time, and the effects can be wide reaching. Dehydration can cause rocks to crack and trigger earthquakes, and over geologic timescales, this ...

Massive tectonic collisions in the tropics may have caused Earth's last three great ice ages. Before each of these ice ages, new research finds, collisions between continents and island arcs built ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Plate tectonics is the means through which mountains are formed. The Baird Mountains in Alaska’s ...

Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates were ...

Ancient rocks on the coast of Oman that were once driven deep down toward Earth's mantle may reveal new insights into subduction, an important tectonic process that fuels volcanoes and creates ...

Mountain building, also known as orogenesis, is a geological process that involves the formation and uplift of large, elevated landforms, known as mountains. The term "orogenesis" comes from Greek ...

Geological processes shape the planet Earth and are in many ways essential to our planet's habitability for life. One important geological process is plate tectonics – the drifting, colliding and ...

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 ...