Earth is speckled with mountains, from the slight Mount Wycheproof, rising 482 feet (147 meters) above sea level in Victoria, Australia, to the highest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest, standing ...

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 ...

When you walk around on land, you are walking on top of Earth’s rocky crust. Below the crust is another thick layer of rock. These layers form Earth’s tectonic plates, and when those plates collide ...

The theory of plate tectonics is strikingly recent in scientific history, which was widely accepted in the early 1960's. Now, scientists have discovered an alternative style to plate tectonics and ...

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled with natural fluctuations in the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Over the past century, humans have pushed CO₂ ...

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, ...

Researchers have produced a new estimate for the origin of Earth's plate tectonics—the movement of large chunks of the planet's outer layer, or crust. Although there is broad consensus that plate ...