New research reveals that Earth’s continents owe their stability to searing heat deep in the planet’s crust. At more than 900°C, radioactive elements shifted upward, cooling and strengthening the ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Scientists know that the world’s continents emerged during the Archean eon, which stretched from about 4 ...

Extreme heat deep in Earth’s crust forged the strong, stable continents that have endured for billions of years.

The oldest continents in our galaxy may have arisen 5 billion years before Earth’s, new research suggests — and that means there may be multiple worlds in the Milky Way harboring alien life even more ...

Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. She has covered weird animal behavior, space news and the impacts of ...

The formation of Earth’s continents billions of years ago set the stage for life to thrive. But scientists disagree over how those land masses formed and if it was through geological processes we ...

Over tens of millions of years, as the familiar story goes, these giant hunks of rock slowly split apart, breaking up at a rate of just a millimeter — a little more than the thickness of a credit card ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London.

Formed millions to billions of years ago, diamonds can shine light into the darkest and oldest parts of the Earth's mantle. The analysis of ancient, superdeep diamonds dug up from mines in Brazil and ...

In 2005, I was navigating winding roads through the Drakensberg Mountains, in Lesotho, Southern Africa. Towering cliff-like features known as escarpments interrupt the landscape, rising up by a ...