The oldest crust on Earth, known to be unchanging, is actually being altered in real time. The North American continent is "dripping" rock into the lower layers of the Earth, new research says, and in ...

Researchers have found that the Earth's continents really aren't as solid as a rock. A groundbreaking new study found that cratons, the cores of continents, are less stable than thought. They ...

Cratonic dripping is a process that can last millions of years. As you read this, the North American continent’s underside is dribbling away into Earth’s molten mantle. And according to researchers at ...

This graphic shows the thickness (in kilometers) of the North American lithosphere. The blue area is about 250 km thick and, based on new findings reported in Nature, is composed of a 3-billion-year ...

The North American continent is not one thick, rigid slab, but a layer cake of ancient, 3 billion-year-old rock on top of much newer material probably less than 1 billion years old, according to a new ...

There are 35 large Archean cratons around the world that form the geologic core of tectonic plates. Because they’re located at the interior of plates, these landmasses often remain unaltered over the ...

North Americans should breathe easy: New research confirms that the continent has eroded very little over the past 1.5 billion years and, in all likelihood, won’t shed much ground in the next billion ...

Scientists have discovered that a portion of the North American craton is slowly dripping into Earth's mantle, challenging the idea that these ancient crustal structures are immovable. Seismic imaging ...

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 ...

There’s interesting stuff down there, the North American craton: the continental nucleus, made up of precambrian rock—”precambrian” being the period which covers the first four billion of the Earth’s ...

The continent of North America is not a single, thick, rigid slab, but is instead more similar to a layer cake, with a section of 3-billion-year-old rock sitting atop much newer material, a new study ...

The North American continent is not one thick, rigid slab, but a layer cake of ancient, 3-billion-year-old rock on top of much newer material probably less than 1 billion years old, according to a new ...