Continental clues: 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 ...

What is the chemical composition of the Earth’s interior? Because it is impossible to drill more than about ten kilometres deep into the Earth, volcanic rocks formed by melting Earth’s deep interior ...

A study suggests that Earth's crust in the Hadean eon, more than 4 billion years ago, was more similar to the modern continental crust than previously thought, with implications for the timing of ...

Our planet was born around 4.5 billion years ago. To understand this mind-bendingly long history, we need to study rocks and the minerals they are made of. The oldest rocks in Australia, which are ...

Scientists show that remnants of the roots of Earth's first crust are still present in the terrestrial mantle and contribute to magmas erupted at the surface over Earth's history. In an international ...

Earth as we know it today looked drastically different several billion years ago. According to a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the composition ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Earth's first crust looked ...

A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of Earth's crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean--a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how ...

“To see a world in a grain of sand,” the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do. We observe the composition of mineral ...

An artist's conception of the early Earth, showing a surface bombarded by large impacts that result in the extrusion of magma onto the surface. At the same time, distal portions of the planet's ...