On present-day Earth, plate subduction continuously modifies the chemical composition of the convecting mantle, and various mantle sources linked to these processes have been widely studied. However, ...

Lake Turkana in northern Kenya is often called the cradle of humankind. Home to some of the earliest hominids, its fossil-rich basin has helped scientists piece together the story of human evolution.

The Afar region in northeastern Africa represents one of the few locations on Earth where a new ocean may be forming over the next several million years. Situated at a unique triple junction where the ...

Outline diagram of the foreland thrust zone of Xuefeng Mountain. (b) Schematic diagram of the foreland thrust zone of Xuefeng Mountain. A pioneering study published in Geoscience—a premier journal ...

This groundbreaking research offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Earth’s tectonic evolution from 1.8 Ga to the present, bridging critical gaps in pre-Pangean plate dynamics. By merging three ...

The Himalayan syntaxes are the arcuate termini of the India–Asia collision zone, where the convergent plates form pronounced bends at the eastern and western corners of the orogen. These regions ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Are we alone, and if so, why? So far, the search for ...

Our planet has experienced dramatic climate shifts throughout its history, oscillating between freezing “icehouse” periods and warm “greenhouse” states. Scientists have long linked these climate ...

The assembly and fragmentation of Gondwana was governed by a complex interplay of crustal rifting, magmatic activity, sedimentation and collisional orogeny. Modern geochronological techniques, notably ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, we have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s geological record has ...