Learn how the layers of the Earth are structured, and the theory of plate tectonics in this guide for KS3 geography students aged 11-14 from BBC Bitesize.

There are two different types of crust : continental crust: which carries land, and oceanic crust, which carries water. Continental plates are usually quite thick (between 35 to 70 km) compared to ...

Plate Tectonics is a widely accepted scientific theory which suggests the Earth's lithosphere is made up of several large tectonic plates, which have been moving apart for centuries. According to ...

There is still a lively debate for example about precisely when and how plate tectonics got going on Earth. More than four billion years ago as the result of asteroid impacts, argued one recent ...

A series of pictures produced using satellite images have had the Earth's tectonic plate boundaries marked on them in yellow to highlight the features created by their movement. The particularly ...

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the "pertaining to building") is a scientific theory that describes the large-scale motion of Earth's lithosphere. This theoretical model ...

Plate tectonics allows heat from Earth's interior to escape to the surface, forming continents and other geological features necessary for life to emerge. Accordingly, "there has been the ...

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of ...

In this video, we meet Lucía Pérez-Díaz, a geologist at Oxford, who studies our planet’s stunning ability to constantly change its face, through the process of plate tectonics.

Surprisingly, geologists don't have a good answer for when plate tectonics emerged, and estimates range from 700 million years ago to before 4 billion years ago, when Earth was still in its infancy.

The research provides chemical evidence that plate tectonics was most likely occurring more than 4.2 billion years ago when life is thought to have first formed on our planet.