NORFOLK, Va. — Fault lines are fractures or breaks in the Earth's crust where tectonic plates move past each other, often resulting in earthquakes. These geological features are classified into three ...

Scientists used satellite data to confirm that Earth's crust is "dripping" into the mantle beneath Turkey's Central Anatolian ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

A unique rock formation in China holds clues that tectonic plates subducted, or went underneath other plates, during the Archean eon (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), just as they do nowadays, a ...

For the first time in history, scientists have observed the rupture of a tectonic plate in a subduction zone in real time. The study, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, was ...

This study is led by Prof. Yong-Fei Zheng at University of Science and Technology of China. It focuses on the development of tectonic processes along convergent plate margins through inspection of ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Oct 29, 2025, 03:16pm EDT Nov 01, 2025, 01:11pm EDT For the first ...

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...

The tectonic plates are among the most powerful forces on Earth, exerting tremendous influence over every single life that unfolds on this planet. They are both creators and destroyers, capable of ...