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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have eliminated one possible origin for Earth's continents. Despite the importance of Earth's continents, the huge pieces of the planet's crust that divide its oceans, very little is known ...

The formation of the Earth’s continents occurred during a fiery afterbirth known as the Archean Eon, which stretched from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. It was in this bubbling cauldron of ...

The earth is a poor archivist. The rigid tectonic plates of its outer layers are continuously in motion, sliding over one another to swallow almost all records of the past, melting them into the ...

Three main processes are known to generate the thick, stable, ancient rock that forms the roots of a continent, according to geologists. Diving of one tectonic plate beneath the other (which ...

Stretching like a colossal spine along western South America, the Andes stand as the world's longest mountain range. It spans ...

Computational modeling shows that plate tectonics weren't necessary for early continents. The formation of Earth's continents billions of years ago set the stage for life to thrive. But scientists ...