Geoscientists have solved an age-old mystery of oceanic volcanism and plate tectonics, explaining why some islands contain so much continental material despite their distance from continental plates.

Thin oceanic crust is formed by decompression melting of the upper mantle at mid-ocean ridges, but the origin of the thick and buoyant continental crust is enigmatic. Juvenile continental crust may ...

The knowledge of how Earth recycled its crust revealed that fragments of continents slowly peeled away and swept deep beneath ...

Waves in Earth's mantle created by the rifting of continents may peel the planet's crust from below, feeding volcanoes in the middle of the ocean.

From islands to estuaries, everything we see is a thin layer of ever-evolving dirt called the Earth’s crust. What you view on a daily basis is relatively young — approximately 600 million years old; ...

The diagram below shows the structure of the earth. In geography, taking a slice through a structure to see inside is called a cross section. Continental plates are usually quite thick (between 35 to ...

Figure 1: Exploded block diagram of the continental margin beneath the SIAP off west Iberia. Figure 2: Palinspastic reconstruction with arbitrary reference datum 10 of profile Lusigal 12 (ref.16) ...

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 ...