Geologists have made certain assumptions about how the crust making up our planet's earliest surface formed, but a new study has found that Earth's very first protocrust was surprisingly similar to ...

Earth’s earliest crust, formed over 4.5 billion years ago, has long been thought to have lacked the complex chemical features associated with continental crust. However, a recent study published in ...

Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“To see a world in a grain of sand,” the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do. We observe the composition of mineral ...