Earth’s continental crust may have begun forming hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, Yale scientists say — and the reason will be obvious to anyone who has ever baked a cake ...

Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet's history, challenging current theories about plate tectonics. Researchers have made a new discovery that changes ...

New research deepens the understanding of Earth's crust by testing and ultimately eliminating one popular hypothesis about why continental crust is lower in iron and more oxidized compared to oceanic ...

Earth’s continental crust has grown and been reshaped over more than four billion years through the interplay of mantle dynamics, magmatic differentiation and crustal recycling. In its infancy, a ...

In 1981, scientists discovered one of the thinnest portions of the Earth’s crust — a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) thick, earthquake-prone spot under the Atlantic Ocean where the American and African ...

After years of exploration and research, scientists have finished mapping a sunken continent that lurks beneath the South Pacific. This chunk of continental crust, driven to the depths millions of ...

Our planet was born around 4.5 billion years ago. To understand this mind-bendingly long history, we need to study rocks and the minerals they are made of. The oldest rocks in Australia, which are ...

All around the world, from the Red Sea to the deep ocean ridges of the Atlantic, lurk more than a dozen geological misfits. These scraps of continental crust are found in the middle of oceans, ...

Researchers have made a new discovery that changes our understanding of Earth's early geological history, challenging beliefs about how our continents formed and when plate tectonics began. A study ...