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 ...

For centuries, scientists have tried to answer the question, “What’s the Earth made of?” While drilling projects and geological studies have revealed clues about the planet’s crust, the deeper layers ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Earth's first crust looked ...

Picture the Earth’s crust and you most probably think of dense, dry rock. You don’t imagine a goey, honey-like substance trickling down into the planet’s deep underbelly. And yet, new research has ...

Just over 4 billion years ago, magma from Earth’s mantle infiltrated a fracture in the young planet’s primordial crust. Over the following aeons, nearly all of the planet’s early crust melted back ...

An artistic reconstruction of Earth during the Hadean eon (~4.5 billion years ago). Intense volcanic activity, heat from accretion, and frequent impacts kept the young Earth in a molten state. This ...

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 ...

Our planet was born around 4.5 billion years ago. To understand this mind-bendingly long history, we need to study rocks and the minerals they are made of. The oldest rocks in Australia, which are ...

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 ...

When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the ...