The processes that form continental crust from the denser basaltic rocks of the upper mantle may make the lower lithosphere denser ... that occurs throughout Earth's crust, they argue.

Many people envision Earth’s structure as a tidy, layered system: the thin crust on the surface, the thick mantle below ... that Earth’s outer shell, or lithosphere, is divided into large ...

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 ...