New research deepens the understanding of Earth's crust by testing and ultimately eliminating one popular hypothesis about why continental crust is lower in iron and more oxidized compared to oceanic ...

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 ...

The Earth's seven continents may seem like terra firma, but geologists know the "firma" part doesn't prove out. The buoyant shelves of granite that tower miles above the seafloor have a protean past ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Imagine the Earth's crust as the planet's skin: Some areas are old and wrinkled while others have a fresher, more youthful sheen, as if they had been regularly ...

Earth’s continental crust may have emerged 500 million years earlier than scientists had previously estimated. Pinning down when our planet’s land emerged could help us understand the conditions in ...

Image: Tiny crystals called zircons are used to date oceanic crust. A newly developed method that detects tiny bits of zircon in rock reliably predicts the age of ocean crust more than 99 percent of ...

The deep part of Earth's middle layer is on the move. New research finds that the lower mantle, located between 410 miles and 621 miles (660 and 1,000 kilometers) beneath the Earth's crust, is more ...

South of New Zealand in the Tasman Sea is a stretch of stormy ocean where the waves regularly swell 20 feet (6 meters) or more and the winds blow at 30 mph (48 km/h) on a good day. Deep below these ...

A new ocean could form in the distant future after a split continues to form in Africa, according to researchers. "This is the only place on Earth where you can study how a continental rift becomes an ...