Tag: plate tectonics

The Appalachian Mountains , often called the Appalachians, are a system of mountains in eastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million...

The Cascade Volcanoes (also known as the Cascade Volcanic Arc or the Cascade Arc) are a number of volcanoes in a volcanic arc in...

The Caribbean Plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the north coast of South America. Roughly 3.2...

The Alpine Fault is a geological fault, specifically a right-lateral strike-slip fault, that runs almost the entire length of New Zealand's South Island. It...

The Kuril islands, extending from north to south for 1200 km, are a part of the submarine uplift located between the Sea of Okhotsk basin...

The geology of the Himalaya is a record of the most dramatic and visible creations of modern plate tectonic forces. The Himalayas, which stretch...

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) is a mid-ocean ridge, a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and the longest...

The Aleutian Trench (or Aleutian Trough) is a subduction zone and oceanic trench which runs along the southern coastline of Alaska and the adjacent...

The Red Sea was formed by Arabia being split from Africa by movement of the Red Sea Rift. This split started in the Eocene...

A Simple Wilson Cycle The Opening and Closing of An Ocean Basin Wilson cycle The cyclical opening and closing of ocean basins caused by movement of the...

For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered...

The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that runs a length of roughly 810 miles (1,300 km) through California in the United...

The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully...

Fifty million years ago, India slammed into Eurasia, a collision that gave rise to the tallest landforms on the planet, the Himalaya Mountains and...

 Exactly 100 years ago, on 6 January 1912, Alfred Wegener presented his theory of continental drift to the public for the first time. At...

Rifting is one of the fundamental geological forces that have shaped our planet. Were it not for the stretching of continents and the oceans...

Bringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution...

More than 40 years ago, pioneering tectonic geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson published a paper in the journal Nature describing how ocean basins opened and...