Along submarine mountain ranges, the mid-ocean ridges, forces from the Earth's interior push tectonic plates apart, forming new ocean floor and thus moving continents about. However, many features of ...

Transform boundaries neither create nor consume crust. Rather, two plates move against each other, building up tension, then releasing the tension in a sudden and often violent jerk. This sudden jerk ...

NORFOLK, Va. — Fault lines are fractures or breaks in the Earth's crust where tectonic plates move past each other, often resulting in earthquakes. These geological features are classified into three ...

With unprecedented clarity, scientists have directly observed a subduction zone—the collision point where one tectonic plate ...

Figure 1: Location and morphostructure of the St Paul shear zone. Figure 4: Thickness map of a 2,800 kg m −3 density layer, which can correspond to crust and/or to altered mantle, derived from the ...

Misfit plates in the Pacific led scientists to the discovery of a microplate between the Galapagos Islands and the South American coast. A microplate discovered off the west coast of Ecuador adds ...