The formation of Earth’s earliest continental crust during the Archean eon (4.0–2.5 Ga) reflects a complex interplay of mantle melting, magmatic differentiation and crustal recycling. Partial melting ...

Oceanic crust forms at mid-ocean spreading centres through a combination of magmatic and tectonic processes, with the magmatic processes creating two distinct layers: the upper and the lower crust.

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 ...

Subduction, a crucial geological process on Earth, may have begun hundreds of millions of years earlier than traditionally believed. This surprising discovery comes from a new study published by ...

Fresh evidence suggests early Earth wasn’t locked under a rigid stagnant lid but was already experiencing intense subduction. Ancient melt inclusions and advanced simulations point to continents ...

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 ...

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 ...

Parts of ancient Earth may have formed continents and recycled crust through subduction far earlier than previously thought. New research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has ...

“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 ...

The Earth's Moon had a rough start in life. Formed from a chunk of the Earth that was lopped off during a planetary collision, it spent its early years covered by a roiling global ocean of molten ...