The plates make up Earth's outer shell, called the lithosphere. (This includes the crust and uppermost part of the mantle.) Churning currents in the molten rocks below propel them along like a ...

Long back, a large collection of material masses coalesced and formed the Earth – it was a single crust or plate with no ...

Earth's lithosphere — its crust and rigid upper mantle — is split into roughly 15 constantly-moving plates. These plates are perpetually shifting, colliding and pulling apart from one another.

Earthquakes occur when the rock on one side of a fault slips relative to the other. The fault surface can be vertical, ...