Earth’s eighth continent, Zealandia, has been largely unrecognized and “missing” from maps for 375 years. This mostly underwater landmass, spanning about 4.9 million square kilometers, challenges ...

The history of Earth's continents might be different from what we first thought. The most popular theory of how the continents formed billions of years ago may not be right, according to a paper in ...

How did the continents appear on Earth? This question, crucial for understanding the emergence of civilizations and life itself, remains one of the great mysteries of the early stages of planetary ...

Scientists have eliminated one possible origin for Earth's continents. Despite the importance of Earth's continents, the huge pieces of the planet's crust that divide its oceans, very little is known ...

The formation of the Earth’s continents occurred during a fiery afterbirth known as the Archean Eon, which stretched from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. It was in this bubbling cauldron of ...

Computational modeling shows that plate tectonics weren't necessary for early continents. The formation of Earth's continents billions of years ago set the stage for life to thrive. But scientists ...

The mechanisms underlying two important phenomena in the Archean—the emergence of continental crust and the presence of an exceptionally strong geomagnetic field—remain poorly understood. Notably, ...

The earth is a poor archivist. The rigid tectonic plates of its outer layers are continuously in motion, sliding over one another to swallow almost all records of the past, melting them into the ...

In a bizarre geological twist of fate, researchers report that the very continents on which we humans call home were likely a byproduct of four-billion-year-old giant Earth impactors incredibly ...