Life depends on Earth’s ancient continental crust – but there are only a few places where remnants of it can still be seen today.
Articles on Continental crust
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Diamonds form alongside a distinct purple companion. We studied it to reach a conclusion about how rare they might actually be.
Giant meteorite impacts may have created the land we live on
Dating of rocks that once formed some of the world’s first beaches suggests the first large continents grew large enough to rise above sea level roughly 3 billion or so years ago.
Evidence from the Pilbara region suggests Earth in its youth behaved very differently to how it does today, and had more water within it than previously thought.
In what could be described as a rather difficult adolescence, Earth earliest continents remained in flux — disappearing and reappeared over 1.5 billion years before finally gaining form.
How the earliest continents formed has been a matter of debate. Analysis of zircons in Canada and Australia suggest that those historical processes are similar to current tectonic movements.
Top contributors
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Professor of Geochronology, Curtin University
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Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow, Monash University
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Associate Professor, Monash University
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Professor, Geology, Curtin University
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Professor of Petrology, Queensland University of Technology
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PhD Candidate, Queensland University of Technology
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Professeur , Sciences de la Terre et de l'atmosphère, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
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Research Associate, The University of Queensland
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Associate Professor, Trinity College Dublin
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Lecturer in Geophysics, Monash University
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Adjunct Research Fellow, Curtin University
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Assistant Professor of Geosciences, Penn State
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Postdoctoral research fellow, Monash University