Researchers used zircons and AI to reconstruct Earth's ancient crust, revealing possible tectonic processes from the planet's ...

New research from HKU geologists suggests that Earth's first continents were born not from plate tectonics, but from deep ...

Geologists from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how Earth's early continents ...

New research has dramatically reshaped our understanding of Earth’s early geological history, overturning traditional beliefs ...

The rifting of continents involves faulting (tectonism) and magmatism, which reflect the strain-rate and temperature dependent processes of solid–state deformation and decompression melting ...

Little is known about the nature and evolution of Earth's continental crust before a few billion years ago because cratons, or stable swaths of the lithosphere more than 2–3 billion years old ...

The first emergence and persistence of continental crust on Earth during the Archaean (4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago) has important implications for plate tectonics, ocean chemistry, and ...

There could also be implications for the evolution of life in the ocean, which thrived on those continental nutrients, the researchers said — however, more research is required to know for sure.

Why The Oldest Continental Crust Doesn’t Last Forever They’re the most stable parts of the planet until they aren’t, and geologists want to know what causes the change.

To do so, Dr. Ziyi Zhu, Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia, and colleagues developed a theoretical model for the mass/volume balance of continental crust and compared the amount of ...

Both elements have long been used to study the history of continental crust. According to the researchers, certain signatures of hafnium and neodymium that appear during the Archean eon would have had ...