A section of the upper mantle and crust under the Sierra Nevada mountains is peeling away, in a process that may mimic how ...

From the time Earth came into existence, there has been long-term stability in some cratons of the continental crust and others have gone through little destruction because of mantle convection or ...

The ocean plate was once the seafloor of Neotethys — an ocean that formed when the supercontinent Pangaea broke up into a ...

Using nearly four decades of seismic data from stations encompassing the northern, central, and southern Sierra Nevada along California's eastern border, geologists have uncovered signs of a critical ...

Scientists discovered a hidden process where Earth's crust peels away and sinks, reshaping continents over millions of years, revealing Earth's slow evolution.

New crust is continually being pushed away from divergent boundaries (where sea-floor spreading occurs), increasing Earth's surface. But the Earth isn't getting any bigger. What happens ...

In the latter case, high temperatures and pressures lead to the reworking of the crust, affecting its composition, as well as that of the underlying mantle. Furthermore, when two continental ...

Continental and oceanic plates all fit together to form the outer crust of the planet. Eight major plates are named on the diagram below. Heat from the core makes magma in the mantle rise towards ...

Some can be nearly as old as the solar system itself, about 4.6 billion years. Continental crust is generally higher in silica, which makes it less dense. This low density makes continents too ...

For geologists, a continent is a large area of thick continental crust composed of granite or similar igneous rocks, forming the continental base, in combination with metamorphic rocks ...

The Earth's surface is constantly reshaped by the movement of tectonic plates, which make up the continental crust on which ...