Plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth’s crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought—and may be a big ...

where the oceanic rock descends into the Earth's interior. The downward pull is a key driver The coherent narrative of plate tectonics was about to fall rapidly into place. McKenzie's paper was ...

"Why is Earth the only rocky planet to have plate tectonics?" said Qian Yuan, lead author of that paper and a postdoctoral fellow in geodynamics at the California Institute of Technology.