The origins of plate tectonics on Earth are hotly debated, but evidence from Australia now shows that parts of the crust ...

Earth-like plate tectonics may have shaped Venus billions of years ago A new study bolsters the theory that microbial life could have existed on our sister planet. Laura Baisas Oct 27, 2023 11:00 ...

Plate tectonics allows heat from Earth's interior to escape to the surface, forming continents and other geological features necessary for life to emerge. Accordingly, "there has been the ...

The earliest indications of plate tectonics appeared about 3.8 billion years ago, not too long after the Earth's formation.

If the solar system’s hottest world, once had plate tectonics, maybe it was also capable of sustaining life long ago. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely occurring more than 4.2 billion years ago when life is thought to have first formed on our planet.

Long ago, Venus had an ocean’s worth of water, for potentially billions of years. This could have made plate tectonics possible, as liquid water permits plates to break, bend and flow.

The finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that “when we’re looking for exoplanets ...

Due to the radiative thermal conductivity of the mineral olivine, only oceanic plates over 60 million years old and subducting at more than 10 centimeters per year remain sufficiently cold to ...

Plate tectonics may also have given life an evolutionary boost. Robert Stern, a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, thinks plate tectonics arose sometime in the Neoproterozoic era ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of ...

Yet plate tectonics also helps regulate a planet’s temperatures. These rigid plates inevitably collide with and subduct (slide and sink) under other plates, I noted in Sky & Telescope.