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 ...

The surface of our planet is a true geological theater where a permanent spectacle of movements and transformations takes place. These impressive phenomena result from plate tectonics, a ...

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than ...

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 Earth's seven continents may seem like terra firma, but geologists know the "firma" part doesn't prove out. The buoyant shelves of granite that tower miles above the seafloor have a protean past ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Imagine the Earth's crust as the planet's skin: Some areas are old and wrinkled while others have a fresher, more youthful sheen, as if they had been regularly ...

Seismologists investigating how Earth forms new continental crust have compiled more than 20 years of seismic data from a wide swath of South America's Andean Plateau and determined that processes ...

Earth’s continental crust may have emerged 500 million years earlier than scientists had previously estimated. Pinning down when our planet’s land emerged could help us understand the conditions in ...

Image: Tiny crystals called zircons are used to date oceanic crust. A newly developed method that detects tiny bits of zircon in rock reliably predicts the age of ocean crust more than 99 percent of ...

South of New Zealand in the Tasman Sea is a stretch of stormy ocean where the waves regularly swell 20 feet (6 meters) or more and the winds blow at 30 mph (48 km/h) on a good day. Deep below these ...