A study reveals that the oldest continental crust on Earth is slowly being broken up by shifting tectonic forces.

Deep within the Earth’s mantle, rhythmic pulses of hot lava are emerging on the surface, offering a rare glimpse into the ...

The continental crust is the layer of granitic, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks which form the continents and the areas of shallow seabed close to their shores, known as continental shelves. It ...

Scientists found that the speed at which continents split apart directly influences how molten rock flows deep beneath ...

To do so, Dr. Ziyi Zhu, Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia, and colleagues developed a theoretical model for the mass/volume balance of continental crust and compared the amount of ...

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 ...

Some areas of continental crust have maintained long-term stability from the beginning of Earth's history, with little destruction by tectonic events or mantle convection, known as cratons.

“By incorporating this effect, we were able to demonstrate that even though the first evidence of a depleted mantle was seen only 3.8 billion years ago, the real continental crust was formed about 0.7 ...

Why The Oldest Continental Crust Doesn’t Last Forever They’re the most stable parts of the planet until they aren’t, and geologists want to know what causes the change.

Over periods of hundreds of millions years, this churn created vast bodies of silica-rich, buoyant new crust. This process didn't last forever. As Earth cooled, the dominant process to form new crust ...

This lightweight rock "floats" atop the heavier crust in ocean basins. Where it ends up depends on the movement of the oceanic plates, which are shifted laterally by the subterranean churning of the ...

New continental crust comes from continental arc volcanoes found at subduction zones like the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. These zones are where an oceanic ...