No planet has the complex melange of volcanic rocks, sediment, metamorphic rocks and cooled magma that are Earth's continents. The current theory, based on the ages of tiny zircon crystals found in ...

a pivotal event in our planet's history." This is an Inside Science story. Earth's first continents may have emerged from the oceans roughly 750 million years earlier than previously thought, rising ...

The Changing Nature of Our Planet. This new perspective on Earth’s continents challenges long-held assumptions and invites ...

Geologists from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how Earth's early continents ...

Across the planet, water makes up 71% of Earth’s surface.The remaining space is covered by land — continents and islands. Before Earth’s land formed the seven continents in the present day ...

But we don’t know when or how quickly the continents formed — it’s one of the most challenging questions about Earth’s early history. Some geologists believe most of the continents popped up in the ...

For more than a billion years, Earth covered itself in new continents. New research shows that those continents were quickly swallowed up again but their deaths fertilized life on the surface.

During the so-called Archean Eon, the first continents were beginning to coagulate at the Earth's surface. How they got there has been one of the longest standing and most debated questions for ...

She found that the first continents formed around nearby sun-like stars up to 2 billion years earlier than Earth's plate tectonics began. The oldest continents of a nearby star are around HD 4614 ...

Earth's first continents may have formed close to the planet's surface, oozing out from the crust instead of boiling up from the mantle as was thought.

Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in school. By Matt Kaplan The world is split up into continents, there ...