Cratons are the most ancient, stable pieces of tectonic plates, but even these geological formations can change over time. A new study details how the North American plate is “dripping” into the ...

Researchers have discovered that the underside of the North American continent is dripping away in blobs of rock—and that the remnants of a tectonic plate sinking in Earth's mantle may be the reason ...

A tear 75 kilometres long runs through the oceanic plate that dives beneath the Pacific Northwest, and one fault along it has dropped the slab by about 5 kilometres. Off Vancouver Island, the Juan de ...

North America wouldn’t look much like it currently does without a tectonic plate that has largely been lost to the Earth’s geological history. The Farallon plate, which has since largely vanished ...

The work, by researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of California, Davis and the University of Colorado Boulder, is published in Science. "If we don't understand the underlying ...

A figure from the study showing rock dripping from the craton. The researchers hypothesize that the dripping is caused by the remnants of the subducting Farallon slab below the craton. Researchers ...