Earth’s continental crust has grown and been reshaped over more than four billion years through the interplay of mantle dynamics, magmatic differentiation and crustal recycling. In its infancy, a ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Like a fine French bread, Earth would be nothing without its crust. And like a fine French wine, that crust has aged exceptionally well. The rigid, rocky continental crust has been a feature of the ...

It’s a bit of a stretch, but the analogy works. Sometimes Earth’s tectonic plates pull apart from one another like taffy. In eastern Africa, that taffy is already thin and weak, and the tugging forces ...

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 ...