Low, winding ridges run across the Moon’s dark plains like faint seams in cooled wax. They are easy to miss in a wide photo.

Tectonic plates — which divide Earth’s crust and reshape our planet in an ongoing, dynamic process — may be the key to supporting life. In fact, because Earth is the only planet known to be home to ...

Planetary scientists have produced the first global map of small mare ridges on the Moon, adding new evidence that the lunar surface has been reshaped in geologically recent times by tectonic forces ...

Our planet is in constant flux. Tectonic plates—the large slabs of rock that divide Earth’s crust so that it looks like a cracked eggshell—jostle about in fits and starts that continuously reshape our ...

Researchers have studied structures in the lunar maria that indicate earthquakes. These could also affect manned missions.

A gravity gradient model of the central Indian Ocean shows the junction of the African tectonic plate (left), the Indo-Australian plate (right) and the Antarctic plate (bottom). Credit: Scripps ...

Far beneath the ocean's surface, where mountain belts rise and ancient oceanic crust lies hidden, a long-lost tectonic plate has been brought back into view. In one of Earth's most tectonically ...

Rocks in Australia preserve evidence that plates in Earth’s crust were moving 3.5 billion years ago, a finding that pushes back the beginnings of plate tectonics by hundreds of millions of years.