Experts have warned about the impact of an enormous ‘death’ process which is impacting our home planet.

If we condensed Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single calendar year, humans would appear at just 11:59 p.m. on December 31. During this immense span of time, the planet’s appearance and composition have undergone dramatic changes, driven in part by the movement of tectonic plates.

These plates are massive slabs of solid rock that float atop Earth’s liquid mantle. When they shift, entire continents can collide. One way this occurs is through what geologists call a “subduction zone,” where one tectonic plate slides beneath another—typically when an oceanic plate sinks under either another oceanic plate or a continental one.

Scientists studying the subduction zone where the Juan de Fuca and Explore plates descend beneath the North American Plate may have captured the first glimpse of a plate undergoing a “death” process.

Dr. Brandon Shuck, lead author of the study, and his team used a combination of seismic reflection imaging and earthquake records to observe this unusual geological behavior.

Dr. Shuck explained: “Getting a subduction zone started is like trying to push a train uphill — it takes a huge effort. But once it’s moving, it’s like the train is racing downhill, impossible to stop. Ending it requires something dramatic — basically, a train wreck.”

Using a 15-kilometre-long streamer of listening instruments, the researchers made an unexpected discovery: tectonic plates do not collapse all at once. Instead, they break apart gradually.

“So instead of a big train wreck, it’s like watching a train slowly derail, one car at a time,” Dr. Shuck said.

One particular section has caught the team’s attention.

“There’s a very large fault that’s actively breaking the [subducting] plate,” Dr. Shuck noted. “It’s not 100% torn off yet, but it’s close.

“Once a piece has completely broken off, it no longer produces earthquakes because the rocks aren’t stuck together anymore.”

The researchers hope their findings will deepen understanding of geological processes worldwide—including in Baja California, where scattered “microplates” may signal the presence of dying subduction zones.

While this dramatic process unfolds rapidly in geological terms, for us, it is a “train wreck” progressing over millions of years.