A handful of regions around the world regularly unleash terrifyingly large earthquakes. Here are the 21 largest earthquakes ...

Researchers recently discovered a huge chain of extinct volcanoes buried deep below South China that formed when two tectonic ...

The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped geological zone along the edges of the Pacific Ocean. It is prone to mega earthquakes ...

Geologists demonstrate the reconstruction of the subduction of the Nazca Ocean plate, the remnants of which are currently found down to 1,500 kilometers, or about 900 miles, below the Earth's ...

The current phase of subduction of the Nazca slab was established in the Peruvian Andes after a plate reorganization around 80 million years ago and then propagated progressively southwards.

They formed when an oceanic tectonic plate — the Nazca plate beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean — was driven against and under the South American continent (Fig. 1), a process called subduction.

The July 30 earthquake occurred due to tensions along the subduction faultline between the Pacific and the Okhotsk tectonic plates. The area is part of the Ring of Fire, a zone of earthquakes and ...

The subduction is thought to have continued until around 120 million years ago, and lies under the Nazca Plate, but is thought to be from a previous subduction event.

In the case of the Nazca plate, more than 3,400 miles (5,500 km) of lithosphere, the outer, rigid part of the crust and upper mantle, was lost to the mantle, the researchers said.