ANN ARBOR—As anyone with a smattering of geological knowledge knows, Earth’s crust is made up of plates that creep over the planet’s surface at a rate of several inches per year. But why do they move ...

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 ...

An international research collaboration has harnessed supercomputing power to better understand how massive slabs of ancient ocean floors are shaped as they sink hundreds of kilometers below Earth's ...

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.