Magnetic crystals provide the earliest evidence yet of the plate tectonics that likely made Earth habitable, pushing its start back by 140 million years.

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 ...

Scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence yet that Earth’s tectonic plates were on the move 3.5 billion years ago. By analyzing magnetic fingerprints in ancient rocks, they reconstructed ...

Earth’s earliest crust may have looked a lot more like the continents we know today than scientists once believed. A recent study shakes up old ideas about how Earth's surface evolved, showing that ...

But scientists have debated for decades when this shift began. Some theories suggest that Earth’s crust was a single, rigid shell before it was shattered. A new study has uncovered the oldest evidence ...

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 ...