A small team of geologists and seismologists at the California Institute of Technology has found evidence via computer modeling that suggest giant blobs of material near the Earth's core, believed to have been created by ...
Ancient, expansive tracts of continental crust called cratons have helped keep Earth's continents stable for billions of years, even as landmasses shift, mountains rise and oceans form. A new mechanism proposed by Penn State ...
Earth Sciences
May 8, 2024
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15
An SMU-led research team has found that ancient rocks and fossils from long-extinct marine reptiles in Angola clearly show a key part of Earth's past—the splitting of South America and Africa and the subsequent formation ...
Earth Sciences
May 1, 2024
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Earth is the only life-supporting planet we know of, so it's tempting to use it as a standard in the search for life elsewhere. But the modern Earth can't serve as a basis for evaluating exoplanets and their potential to ...
Astrobiology
May 7, 2024
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22
Taiwan was shaken by dozens of earthquakes overnight and into Tuesday that left buildings swaying and some tilting, with the government saying they were aftershocks from a huge deadly quake that hit the island more than two ...
Environment
Apr 23, 2024
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9
A volcano erupted several times in Indonesia's outermost region Wednesday, with authorities raising the alert level to its highest point after the dome spewed a column of smoke more than a mile into the sky and forced hundreds ...
Environment
Apr 17, 2024
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39
Plate tectonics (from the Greek τέκτων; tektōn, meaning "builder" or "mason") describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere. The theory encompasses the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century by Alfred Wegener, and seafloor spreading, understood during the 1960s.
The lithosphere is broken up into what are called tectonic plates. In the case of Earth, there are currently eight major and many minor plates (see list below). The lithospheric plates ride on the asthenosphere. These plates move in relation to one another at one of three types of plate boundaries: convergent, or collisional boundaries; divergent boundaries, also called spreading centers; and transform boundaries. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation occur along plate boundaries. The lateral movement of the plates is typically at speeds of 50–100 mm annually.
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