Ancient crystals reveal that Earth began recycling its crust and forming continents billions of years earlier than scientists ...

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 ...

Scientists have eliminated one possible origin for Earth's continents. Despite the importance of Earth's continents, the huge pieces of the planet's crust that divide its oceans, very little is known ...

The formation of the Earth’s continents occurred during a fiery afterbirth known as the Archean Eon, which stretched from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. It was in this bubbling cauldron of ...

The earth is a poor archivist. The rigid tectonic plates of its outer layers are continuously in motion, sliding over one another to swallow almost all records of the past, melting them into the ...

Tiny crystals of zircon could be geological evidence that the continents were born at meteor impact sites. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how ...

Computational modeling shows that plate tectonics weren't necessary for early continents. The formation of Earth's continents billions of years ago set the stage for life to thrive. But scientists ...

In a bizarre geological twist of fate, researchers report that the very continents on which we humans call home were likely a byproduct of four-billion-year-old giant Earth impactors incredibly ...

Three main processes are known to generate the thick, stable, ancient rock that forms the roots of a continent, according to geologists. Diving of one tectonic plate beneath the other (which ...

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 ...