The Euphrates River is the longest river in Western Asia and runs through the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent. Flowing ...

An exceptionally well-preserved skull from a fish which lived 384–382 million years ago helps explain how plate tectonics played a key role in the evolution of ancient bony fish which eventually led ...

The Earth’s lithosphere is continuously reshaped by the relative motions of rigid and deformable tectonic plates driven by mantle convection, slab pull and ridge push forces. Over hundreds of millions ...

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some ...

On present-day Earth, plate subduction continuously modifies the chemical composition of the convecting mantle, and various mantle sources linked to these processes have been widely studied. However, ...

Ancient plate tectonics in the Archean period differs from modern plate tectonics in the Phanerozoic period because of the higher mantle temperatures inside the early Earth, the thicker basaltic crust ...

Rifted margins mark the transition from continental to oceanic realms and preserve a rich archive of lithospheric deformation, magmatism and sedimentary processes. Initiated by plate divergence, ...

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 ...

Due to the radiative thermal conductivity of the mineral olivine, only oceanic plates over 60 million years old and subducting at more than 10 centimeters per year remain sufficiently cold to ...

Lake Turkana in northern Kenya is often called the cradle of humankind. Home to some of the earliest hominids, its fossil-rich basin has helped scientists piece together the story of human evolution.

That would have enabled more of this organic carbon—and carbonate accumulating in shallow water around Columbia—to be ...

A geologic map of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia. The rocks exposed here range from 2.5 to 3.5 billion years ago, offering a uniquely well-preserved window into Earth's deep past. The authors ...