How to Use plate tectonics in a Sentence

plate tectonics

noun
  • Mars no longer has active plate tectonics.
    — Ryan Brennan, Kansas City Star, 27 Apr. 2026
  • No one knows, however, how or when plate tectonics got started on Earth in the first place.
    — Marissa Grunes, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2026
  • The process is necessary, however, to any form of plate tectonics.
    — Marissa Grunes, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2026
  • All this activity, called plate tectonics, seems to be unique in our solar system.
    — Marissa Grunes, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2026
  • On our planet, rubies are made in the extreme heat and pressure of Earth’s crust as a result of plate tectonics.
    — Adam Kovac, Scientific American, 12 May 2026
  • But plate tectonics won't maintain the biosphere forever.
    — Stefanie Waldek, Space.com, 24 Sep. 2025
  • But over 4 billion years ago, there was no plate tectonics, and Earth was chemically much more simple.
    — David Bressan, Forbes.com, 16 Sep. 2025
  • Our beautiful encircling topography of mountains and hills is a bowl ready-made by ancient plate tectonics to be filled with smoke and smog.
    — Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 26 Mar. 2026
  • Early in its history, cold, dense surface rock would have sunk through hot mantle rock in ways that bear little resemblance to modern plate tectonics.
    — Scott K. Johnson, ArsTechnica, 26 May 2026
  • The models suggest that Earth may have passed through a squishy-lid phase that gradually primed its lithosphere for full plate tectonics as the planet cooled.
    — Samantha Mathewson, Space.com, 30 Nov. 2025
  • Aims of the science include learning how the oceans and magnetic field of Venus disappeared, and how plate tectonics changed the terrain.
    — Elizabeth Howell, Space.com, 4 Nov. 2025
  • The key to this balance is plate tectonics, which regulate the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide via the carbon-silicate cycle.
    — Stefanie Waldek, Space.com, 24 Sep. 2025
  • And understanding what kind of tectonics operated back then may set limits on ways in which Earth’s modern plate tectonics got started.
    — Marissa Grunes, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2026
  • Unlike Earth, which has plate tectonics that recycle crustal and mantle material over time, Mars lacks this dynamic process.
    — Theo Burman, MSNBC Newsweek, 29 Aug. 2025
  • On Earth, plate tectonics are continuously (if slowly) recycling between the crust and mantle.
    — Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 28 Aug. 2025
  • The planet has stayed in this range because its carbon dioxide is regulated through an extraordinary interplay between plate tectonics and life.
    — Peter Brannen, Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
  • Russian geoscience only embraced the theory of plate tectonics in the final years before the Soviet Union collapsed.
    — Scott Montgomery, Forbes.com, 15 Sep. 2025
  • The episodic-squishy lid builds on the traditional divide between plate tectonics or mobile lid regimes (like modern Earth) and stagnant-lid behavior (like Mars).
    — Samantha Mathewson, Space.com, 30 Nov. 2025
  • Researchers even suggest that their findings on Mars could be a clue to what lurks beneath the surface of other rocky planets that lack plate tectonics, including Venus and Mercury.
    — Eric Lagatta, USA Today, 4 Sep. 2025
  • That’s a big deal because plate tectonics is our master story for how Earth recycles rock, drives volcanism and mountain-building, and modulates climate over geologic time.
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 11 Sep. 2025
  • But unlike Earth, the Moon lacks plate tectonics and an atmosphere capable of reshaping its surface and recycling elements such as oxygen over billions of years.
    — Emily First, The Conversation, 27 Mar. 2026
  • Later, after plate tectonics raises such sediments to the land surface, they can be eroded, and the organic carbon within them can be weathered into CO2.
    — Howard Lee, ArsTechnica, 26 June 2026
  • Only slowly this shell broke open, with fragments sinking downward into the Earth’s interior, a process called subduction and today a driving mechanism behind plate tectonics.
    — David Bressan, Forbes.com, 31 Aug. 2025
  • Mars no longer has active plate tectonics and only experienced more significant geological activity in its distant past.
    — Ryan Brennan april 27, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 27 Apr. 2026
  • The significance of the fault and recognition of its large cumulative offset would not be fully appreciated until the advent of plate tectonics more than 50 years later.
    — Kurt Snibbe, Oc Register, 17 Apr. 2026
  • The planet no longer has active plate tectonics and only experienced more significant geological activity in its distant past.
    — Ryan Brennan, Miami Herald, 27 Apr. 2026
  • Since then, generations of geologists have expanded his map, with new theories, like plate tectonics or magmatic differentation, changing our views on how to understand the distribution of rock formations.
    — David Bressan, Forbes.com, 13 Sep. 2025
  • In their Reuniting Twins project, the scientists have developed a digital model of Earth that combines solar physics, volcanology, plate tectonics and climate science.
    — Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
  • Today’s rich variety of igneous rocks forms thanks to complex processes, including remelting, adsorption, and exchange of chemical elements, happening in Earth’s crust and driven by plate tectonics.
    — David Bressan, Forbes.com, 16 Sep. 2025
  • Our new study, published in the journal Communications, Earth and Environment sheds light on how exactly Earth's plate tectonics have helped to shape global climate over the past 540 million years.
    — Ben Mather, Space.com, 7 Feb. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'plate tectonics.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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