The history of Earth's continents might be different from what we first thought. The most popular theory of how the continents formed billions of years ago may not be right, according to a paper in ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

Geologist Dan Murray points at a section of the rock-lined shore edge below Beavertail lighthouse in Jamestown, R.I. JAMESTOWN, R.I. -- For years, scientists have come to a flat, tail-shaped patch of ...

The dance of the continents has been reshaping Earth for billions of years, creating the landscapes we walk on today. Scientists are unlocking secrets about how plate tectonics forged our modern world ...

New research has provided the strongest evidence yet that Earth's continents were formed by giant meteorite impacts that were particularly prevalent during the first billion years or so of our ...

An illustration depicting the formation of TTGs in a two-stage mantle plume-sagduction model. Geologists from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how the ...

These ancient metamorphic rocks called gneisses, found on the Arctic Coast, represent the roots of the continents now exposed at the surface. The scientists said sedimentary rocks interlayered in ...

Formed millions to billions of years ago, diamonds can shine light into the darkest and oldest parts of the Earth's mantle. The analysis of ancient, superdeep diamonds dug up from mines in Brazil and ...

The ancient history of Earth has always been hard to read. Most of the planet’s earliest crust has been lost, buried, or melted by geologic processes over billions of years. The rare remnants that ...

The Earth formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago, according to National Geographic. If the world was captured all those years ago, the land masses would’ve been structured completely different to ...

Across opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean more than 3,700 miles apart, researchers have uncovered footprints left by dinosaurs that could have roamed from Africa to South America when the continents ...