Flipped from head to toe: 100 years of continental drift theory

Exactly 100 years ago, on 6 January 1912, Alfred Wegener presented his theory of continental drift to the public for the first time. At a meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt's Senckenberg Museum, he revealed ...

Deep subduction of the Indian continental crust beneath Asia

Geological investigations in the Himalayas have revealed evidence that when India and Asia collided some 90 million years ago, the continental crust of the Indian tectonic plate was forced down under the Asian plate, sinking ...

Earth's first example of recycling—its own crust

Rock samples from northeastern Canada retain chemical signals that help explain what Earth's crust was like more than 4 billion years ago, reveals new work from Carnegie's Richard Carlson and Jonathan O'Neil of the University ...

New 'embryonic' subduction zone found

(Phys.org) —A new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal heralds the beginning of a cycle that will see the Atlantic Ocean close as continental Europe moves closer to America.

Copper chains: Study reveals Earth's deep-seated hold on copper

Earth is clingy when it comes to copper. A new Rice University study this week in the journal Science finds that nature conspires at scales both large and small -- from the realms of tectonic plates down to molecular bonds ...

Water in Earth's mantle key to survival of oldest continents

Earth today is one of the most active planets in the Solar System, and was probably even more so during the early stages of its life. Thanks to the plate tectonics that continue to shape our planet's surface, remnants of ...

Unexpected earthquakes within continental plates pose challenges

Earthquakes that occur on "passive" continental margins, such as the August 2011 magnitude 5.8 Mineral, Virginia, earthquake, surprise people because they expect earthquakes to occur only on plate boundaries. But, in fact, ...

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