(Phys.org)—New research sheds light on how and when the modern day continents began to form. Researchers from the University of Bristol analyzed radio isotope abundances in 13,000 samples of ...

Deep beneath Alaska's Aleutian Islands, down where the pressure and temperatures have become so high that rock starts to flow, new continental crust is being born. Scientists have long believed that ...

Continental crust is the layer of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks that forms the geological continents and the areas of shallow seabed close to their shores, known as continental shelves.

New experiments have re-created the genesis of Earth’s first continents. By putting the squeeze on water and oceanic rocks under intense heat, researchers produced material that closely resembles the ...

Scientists have shown that south east Iceland is underlain by continental crust. An international team, including researchers at the University of Liverpool, have shown that south east Iceland is ...

The crusty conundrum carries fundamental implications. The thickness of continental crust — the part of Earth’s crust that forms land masses and continents — plays an important role in everything from ...

The ChemCam laser instrument on NASA’s Curiosity rover has turned its beam onto some unusually light-colored rocks on Mars, and the results are surprisingly similar to Earth’s granitic continental ...

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 ...

How do you make half the mass of two continents disappear? To answer that question, you first need to discover that it’s missing. That’s what a trio of University of Chicago geoscientists and their ...

Exposures of the Earth’s crust-mantle transition are scarce, thus, limiting our knowledge about the formation of subcontinental underplate cumulates, and their significance for metal storage and ...

The early Earth might have been habitable much earlier than thought, according to new research. The early Earth might have been habitable much earlier than thought, according to new research from a ...

The Archaean continental crust comprises two major groups of silicon-rich granitoids: the tonalite–trondhjemite–granodiorite and granite–monzonite–syenite suites, which differ in their ...