Latest Farallon Plate Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of American scientists believe they have solved a geological mystery buried about 100 miles below California. According to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geologists from Brown University, Columbia University, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Oregon identified the source of anomalous seismic readings as a fragment of the Farallon tectonic plate, which was pushed deep into the...

50 million years ago, mountains began popping up in southern British Columbia. Over the next 22 million years, a wave of mountain building swept (geologically speaking) down western North America as far south as Mexico and as far east as Nebraska, according to Stanford geochemists. Their findings help put to rest the idea that the mountains mostly developed from a vast, Tibet-like plateau that rose up across most of the western U.S. roughly simultaneously and then subsequently collapsed and...

Researchers at Monash University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography identify movements of plate and plate boundaries; could substantially improve models of tectonic motionA team of researchers including Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego geophysicist Dave Stegman has developed a new theory to explain the global motions of tectonic plates on the earth's surface.The new theory extends the theory of plate tectonics - a kinematic description of plate motion without reference...