The 4.5-billion-year record contained in Earth’s continental crust reveals a seven-phase evolution, from an initial magma ocean to the present-day environment in which we live.
Earth’s crust
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Small-Scale Convection Shuffles the Oceanic Lithosphere
Seafloor spreading organized lithospheric minerals into a lattice, but small-scale convection jumbled up the innermost layer.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Feedbacks Between Deformation and Magmatism as Shear Zones Grow
New research reveals how the presence and absence of magmatism governs how shear zones initiate, grow, and reactivate to connect lower and upper crustal deformation.
Posted inNews
Early Life Learned to Love Oxygen Long Before It Was Cool
Laboratory experiments show that earthquakes may have helped early life evolve in an oxygen-free world.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
New Map of Proposed Mantle-Driven Topography Stirs the Pot
The role the deep Earth plays in creating topography is hotly debated. A new study uses subtle elevation changes around the globe as evidence that the mantle plays a key role in building topography.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Old Igneous Rocks Hold the Key to Crustal Thickness Evolution
The chemical composition of orogenic igneous rocks and their zircons is sensitive to crustal thickness and can be used to quantify the evolution of Moho depths beneath continents back in time.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Zircons and Plate Tectonics
New data on ancient zircons points to a transition from stagnant lid to subduction style tectonics at 3.6 Ga ago.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Understanding and Utilizing the Fractured Earth
The prediction of flow and transport in fractured rock is one of the great challenges in the Earth and energy sciences with far-reaching economic and environmental impacts.
Posted inNews
The Goldilocks Zone May Be Just Right for Migrating Metals
Researchers identified a gateway that allows metals critical for renewable energy technologies, like copper and gold, to make their way to the surface.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Continuity is the Father of Success
Geodetic measurements indicate that Three Sisters Volcano uplifted by almost 300 millimeters in the past 25 years without significant anomalies at the surface.