Our planet's lithosphere is broken into several tectonic plates. Their configuration is ever-shifting, as supercontinents are assembled and broken up, and oceans form, grow, and then start to close in ...

Hundreds of millions of people live along the edges of the Pacific Ocean, directly above tectonic boundaries that produce the ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Oct 29, 2025, 03:16pm EDT Nov 01, 2025, 01:11pm EDT For the first ...

The initiation of plate subduction on Earth may occur before 3 billion years ago or even Hadean. Subduction is the core process of plate tectonics, which gradually lead to the co-evolution of ...

Earth was mostly devoid of oxygen for much of its 4.5 billion year lifetime. That is, until certain processes started to ...

Convergent plate boundaries, where one lithospheric plate descends beneath another, drive subduction and ultimately lead to arc-continent collision. In classical subduction settings, the downgoing ...

A new study, resorting to computational models, predicts that a subduction zone currently below the Gibraltar Strait will propagate further inside the Atlantic and contribute to forming an Atlantic ...

Understanding the origins of the Ring of Fire, the most seismically active place on Earth, is famously difficult as geologic evidence is destroyed in the process. Now a new study suggests that ...

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, drive the world's most devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. How do these danger zones come to be? A study in Geology presents ...

Map highlighting the Atlantic subduction zones, the fully developed Lesser Antilles and Scotia arcs on the western side and the incipient Gibraltar arc on the eastern side. From Duarte et al., 2018.