Tag: plate tectonics
April 18, 2025
How Activity in Earth’s Mantle Led the Ancient Ancestors of Elephants, Giraffes, and Humans into Asia and Africa
What roils beneath the Earth’s surface may feel a world away, but the activity can help forge land masses that dictate ocean circulation, climate patterns,…
Read MoreApril 2, 2025
Zama Basin’s Superb Sand the Result of a Drive-By Microcontinent
The high-quality sands that make up the oil reservoirs in the Zama Basin in the Gulf of Mexico really shouldn’t be there. Large sandstone deposits…
Read MoreMay 7, 2024
Researchers Show That Slow-Moving Earthquakes Are Controlled by Rock Permeability
Earthquakes are the most dramatic and noteworthy results of tectonic plate movement. They are often destructive and deadly, or at the very least physically felt…
Read MoreFebruary 6, 2023
Scientists Detect Molten Rock Layer Hidden Under Earth’s Tectonic Plates
Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth’s crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates…
Read MoreSeptember 15, 2021
Dalziel Honored with Penrose Medal
Professor Ian W.D. Dalziel honored for pioneering discoveries about Earth’s ancient geography and its past supercontinents.
Read MoreJuly 15, 2019
Horton and Becker to Help Lead NSF Flat Slab Research
A $2.7 million multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional NSF-Frontiers of Earth Science grant has been awarded to a team led by Carnegie’s Lara Wagner to study an active…
Read MoreMay 7, 2018
New Research Suggests that Dawn of Plate Tectonics Could Have Turned Earth into Snowball
A research duo from The University of Texas at Austin and UT Dallas have put forward a hypothesis that links the dawn of plate tectonics…
Read MoreApril 21, 2016
Volcanoes Tied to Shifts in Earth’s Climate over Millions of Years
A new study in the April 22 edition of Science reveals that volcanic activity associated with the plate-tectonic movement of continents may be responsible for…
Read MoreNovember 23, 2015
Climate Can Grind Mountains Faster Than They Can Be Rebuilt
Researchers for the first time have attempted to measure all the material leaving and entering a mountain range over more than a million years and…
Read MoreOctober 22, 2014
The World in a Grain of Sand
Daniel Stockli is using zircons to reconstruct past worlds By Melissa Weber Over the quiet thrum of mass spectrometers and various lasers in a lab…
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