Deep within the African continent, a massive geological transformation is taking place as tectonic forces slowly tear the land apart ... During this time, the Afar Depression would continue to sink ...

John Sclater, a geophysicist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a member of the first wave of ...

Scientists believe shifting tectonic plates are leading to the creation of a new ocean, the world's sixth. The geological development results from two land masses slowly moving apart in Africa.

“Tharp’s work certainly provided evidence and weight to the theory of plate tectonics, but her work is really about seafloor spreading, which occurs at the mid-ocean ridges that she was the ...

The East Pacific Rise is located where two such plates are gradually spreading apart. This area contains many hydrothermal vents, fissures in the seafloor situated where seawater and magma beneath ...

For a long time this theory was widely accepted despite only limited evidence of convection currents ever being found, as modern imaging techniques have not been able to identify convection currents ...

When two plates collide they form a destructive margin - this is also known as a convergent margin as two plates are converging. The resulting effect is dependent on what sort of plates are colliding.

the descending slab might have dipped beneath the Nazca plate’s predecessor, Wang says, in a bout of ancient tectonic reshuffling. Regardless of how it got there, part of that seafloor is very ...

often along mid-ocean ridges where tectonic plates separate. These vents create unique ecosystems that support a variety of unusual life forms. Scientists drilled into the seafloor using a ...