The rocks didn’t look like much from the outside. Scattered across a remote stretch of western Australia called North Pole ...

Direct evidence of the movements of tectonic plates has been found in some of the world’s oldest rocks, in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. This evidence dates back 3.5 billion years; the ...

The colossal movements of tectonic plates shape our world, influencing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere, the planet’s protective magnetic field and perhaps even the flourishing of life. Now ...

Magnetic crystals provide the earliest evidence yet of the plate tectonics that likely made Earth habitable, pushing its ...

Without plate tectonics, our planet wouldn’t have continents, mountains, and possibly even life itself. New evidence suggests this geological process began at least 3.2 billion years ago, a ...

Scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence yet that Earth’s tectonic plates were on the move 3.5 billion years ago.

For millions of years, Earth’s moving plates have sculpted continents, carved oceans, and built massive mountain ranges. Yet some of these giant structures vanished deep into the mantle, hidden from ...

In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, ...

Plate tectonics – the drifting of continents – may have got under way at least 3.2 billion years ago and could have played a part in the evolution of life, a study of the magnetism of ancient rocks ...

Scientists have taken a journey back in time to unlock the mysteries of Earth’s early history, using tiny mineral crystals called zircons to study plate tectonics billions of years ago. The research ...