In 2021, geologists animated a video that shows how Earth's tectonic plates moved over the last billion years. But in 2021 a group of geologists offered up an easily digestible peek at 1 billion years of plate tectonic motion. Building a better model of Earth's platesThe Earth's plates move in a variety of ways and can cause earthquakes, mountains, and canyons. The top layer — between 5 and 50 miles thick — is the crust, which is fragmented into tectonic plates that fit together. The jigsaw puzzle of Earth's continents hasn't stopped shifting, of course.

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Persons: Sabin Zahirovic, Pangea, Joshua Stevens, Dietmar Müller Organizations: Service, University of Sydney, U.S . Geological Survey, Geologists, NASA Locations: Antarctica, U.S, Sandwell, Africa, Europe