Scientists have found a massive fan-shaped structure buried beneath East Antarctica, connecting some of the continent’s most ...

Microscopic zircon crystals discovered in Western Australia suggest that Earth may have had continental crust as early as 4.4 billion years ago, millions of years earlier than previously thought. For ...

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland. This area is the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which move apart ~ 2.5 cm/year. Subduction and the formation of continents, a ...

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 ...

Africa’s Turkana Rift Zone, a hotbed of hominin fossils, is caught in the act of “necking," a critical transition toward continental breakup.

Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...

The formation of Earth’s earliest continental crust during the Archean eon (4.0–2.5 Ga) reflects a complex interplay of mantle melting, magmatic differentiation and crustal recycling. Partial melting ...

Olivine cumulate from the Weltevreden Formation showing that although these cumulates are significantly altered, they still contain preserved unaltered olivine cores (microscopic image taken in ...

Scientists discovered how Earth recycles continents deep underground, shaping the unusual rocks found in ancient mountain ...