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 ...

Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don’t agree on how they formed. “The continents started appearing around ...

An ancient slab of Earth's crust buried deep beneath the Midwest is sucking huge swatches of present-day's North American crust down into the mantle, researchers say. The slab's pull has created giant ...

Asteroids and planetesimals regularly bombarded Earth between about 4.6 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, during the Hadean and Archean eons. Because few rocks today are more than 4 billion years old ...

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 ...

Missing crust in the Mid- Atlantic Geologist Marie Tharp produced the first detailed maps of the ocean floor during the 1950s alongside Bruce Heezen at Columbia University. Her pioneering work ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

Continental clues: 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 ...