Africa’s Turkana Rift Zone, a hotbed of hominin fossils, is caught in the act of “necking," a critical transition toward continental breakup.

Continental crust is the layer of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks that forms the geological continents and the areas of shallow seabed close to their shores, known as continental shelves.

Beneath the southwest Pacific Ocean lies a landmass nearly 1.9 million square miles across, larger than India, two-thirds the ...

New experiments have re-created the genesis of Earth’s first continents. By putting the squeeze on water and oceanic rocks under intense heat, researchers produced material that closely resembles the ...

The crusty conundrum carries fundamental implications. The thickness of continental crust — the part of Earth’s crust that forms land masses and continents — plays an important role in everything from ...

Scientists have shown that south east Iceland is underlain by continental crust. An international team, including researchers at the University of Liverpool, have shown that south east Iceland is ...

The ChemCam laser instrument on NASA’s Curiosity rover has turned its beam onto some unusually light-colored rocks on Mars, and the results are surprisingly similar to Earth’s granitic continental ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

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 ...

How do you make half the mass of two continents disappear? To answer that question, you first need to discover that it’s missing. That’s what a trio of University of Chicago geoscientists and their ...