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 ...

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 ...

Researchers have confirmed that a rare geological process called lithospheric dripping is pulling pieces of the Earth’s lower ...

Earth's crust today has a surprisingly similar composition to the planet's first outer shell, or "protocrust," new research finds. This early rocky shell featured chemical signatures previously ...

Continent-sized structures of mineral protruding from the lower mantle towards Earth's outer core may be contributing to an instability of our planet's magnetic field. The two odd formations – one ...

“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 ...

Earth’s surface environment hosts large reservoirs of hydrogen (H, mainly in the form of water, H2O), nitrogen (in atmospheric N2) and carbon (mainly in carbonate rocks). H, N and C are sometimes ...

The oxygen isotope composition of the zircons the researchers examined helped determine whether they come from newly formed crust that has been left undisturbed by Earth's tectonic churning or old, ...

June 26 (UPI) --New research suggests roughly 5 to 6 percent of the Earth's mantle is made up of recycled crust. The discovery, detailed Friday in the journal Science Advances, suggests Earth has been ...