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.

We live on the outermost layer, the crust, which is between 15 and 44 miles thick ... in the mantle since the Earth first formed, rather than having been a plate that sank in the past 200 million ...

The Earth's hard outer layer (where we live) is called the crust. It is made up of large slabs called tectonic plates. The plates fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces far beneath our feet.

India charged across the equator at rates of up to 15 cm/year, in the process closing ... The continents are carried by the Earth's tectonic plates like people on an escalator.

Using this method, scientists can develop models of the Earth’s interior that show where submerged plates formed along subduction zones (which is when a plate goes under, or subducts ...

Plate tectonics give Earth its mountains, earthquakes, continental drift and maybe even helped give rise to life itself. But do other planets in the solar system have them too?