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 ...

Geoscientists have long known that some parts of the continents formed in the Earth's deep past, but the speed in which land rose above global seas -- and the exact shapes that land masses formed -- ...

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 ...

DURING the last few years there has appeared a regular flood of literature, both abstrusely technical and more or less popular, dealing with such questions as the origin and form of the earth as a ...

The continents, a specific feature of our planet, still hold many secrets. Using chemical data on sedimentary rocks compiled from the scientific literature from the 1980s to the present day, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. "We thus find that, while the inorganic world has been in a state ...

The continental lithosphere contains the oldest and most stable structures on Earth, where fragments of ancient material have eluded destruction by tectonic and surface processes operating over ...

Forget the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged ...

Tiny flaws in diamonds hold the secret to the formation of the first continents. In a new study, researchers used inclusions — imperfections derided by jewelers but valuable to scientists — to trace ...

These continental fragments are then swept sideways into the oceanic mantle, sometimes travelling over 1,000 km. Once in the ...