"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Scientists know that the world’s continents emerged during the Archean eon, which stretched from about 4 ...

New research reveals that Earth’s continents owe their stability to searing heat deep in the planet’s crust. At more than ...

Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. She has covered weird animal behavior, space news and the impacts of ...

Over tens of millions of years, as the familiar story goes, these giant hunks of rock slowly split apart, breaking up at a rate of just a millimeter — a little more than the thickness of a credit card ...

Extreme heat deep in Earth’s crust forged the strong, stable continents that have endured for billions of years.

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 ...

The formation of Earth’s continents billions of years ago set the stage for life to thrive. But scientists disagree over how those land masses formed and if it was through geological processes we ...

Earth’s earliest crust may have looked a lot more like the continents we know today than scientists once believed. A recent study shakes up old ideas about how Earth's surface evolved, showing that ...

An illustration depicting the formation of TTGs in a two-stage mantle plume-sagduction model. Geologists from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how the ...

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 discovery that changes ...