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 ...

We often affiliate plate tectonics with earthquakes, as we are all taught in school that the shifting of plates leads to big shakes. But plate tectonics serve a far more important job to the planet ...

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 Earth ...

When a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck off Japan's eastern coast early Friday morning, we all feared a tsunami. But San Francisco gets earthquakes all the time, and we're not scared of a tsunami there ...

Oceanic transform faults have historically been thought of as simple, predictable features. They represent the least well-studied of the three major plate boundaries, which include divergent ...

The initiation of plate tectonics on Earth is a critical event in our planet’s history. The time lag between the first proto-subduction (about 4 billion years ago) and global tectonics (approximately ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (April 11, 2025) - Being a geophysicist can sometimes feel like being a detective —uncovering clues, and then building a case based on the evidence. In a new article published in ...