It was thought that the shallow part of the plate boundary was completely "uncoupled," being able to slowly slip relative to the neighboring plate. However, after the 2011 Great East Japan ...

Japan sits on or near the boundary of four tectonic plates: the Pacific, North American, Eurasian and Filipino plates.* These massive slabs of earth’s crust are endlessly creeping, slipping ...

The Earth's plates jostle about in fits and starts ... volcanoes that eventually build up into island arcs like Japan. At divergent boundaries in the oceans, magma from deep in the Earth's mantle ...

At the boundary between these two ... tectonic system stretching from southern Japan to New Zealand. This vast network of ...

These plates mash and grind together and trigger deadly earthquakes, like the 8.9-magnitude quake that struck on Friday (March 11). [Photos: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in Pictures] The tectonic ...

Experts calculate the fault—or the boundary between two tectonic plates—in the Japan trench slipped by as much as 164 feet (50 meters). Other similarly large magnitude earthquakes ...