Plate tectonics is by no means done, and there are several suggested models as to how our future world will look like. Plate tectonics were only discovered relatively recently.

Due to the abundance of nitrogen and carbon dioxide present in Venus’ atmosphere, the team believes that Venus must have had plate tectonics about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago after the ...

The theory of plate tectonics was developed from the 1950s to the 1970s. It is the modern update to continental drift, an idea first proposed by scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912, who that Earth ...

The new global model revealed many previously unseen areas where wave speeds were higher than expected. These "positive wave speed anomalies" suggest the presence of colder or denser material.

Plate tectonics is a theory of geology developed to explain the phenomenon of continental drift and is currently the theory accepted by the vast majority of scientists working in this area. In the ...

Plate tectonics explains the movement and interaction of the Earth's upper layers. More accurately, the lithosphere, which is composed of the crust and upper layer of the mantle.

Plate tectonics also may have enabled life to recover from devastating mass extinctions. For instance, at the end of the Permian period, a mass extinction driven by carbon-dioxide-spewing volcanic ...

Mysterious blobs inside Earth triggered plate tectonics, study suggests. Modelling suggests the giant impact that formed the moon also left behind material deep inside Earth that may have helped ...

A collision with a Mars-size planetary object called Theia 4.44 billion years ago, left, might not only have formed the moon but also given rise to plate tectonics.

Plate tectonics are absolutely essential if complex life is to evolve, argue Robert Stern of the University of Texas at Dallas and Taras Gerya of ETH Zurich in Switzerland.