According to the team, at intervals within those billion or so years, up to a third of Earth’s crust was sawn off by Snowball Earth’s roaming glaciers and their erosive capabilities.

The team's calculations showed the protocrust—Earth's earliest crust formed during the Hadean eon (4.5–4.0 billion years ago)—would naturally develop the same chemical signatures found in ...

You may like North America is 'dripping' down into Earth's mantle ... which consists of the crust and the relatively brittle upper layer of the mantle, gets especially thick.

Galactic voyage Artist’s impression of the Milky Way showing its spiral arms. (Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R Hurt) The rate at which Earth’s continental crust builds up goes through cycles, peaking ...

These relics of Earth’s ancient continental crust are some of the planet’s oldest rocks. Using material from cratons in Australia and Greenland that are billions of years old, the team ...

In a new paper published in Nature today, colleagues and I reveal secrets of Earth’s crust 4.5 billion years ago. In the process, we also provide a new way to approach one of the biggest ...