Major clues to the origins of our planet—and life itself—are locked inside some three billion-year-old volcanic rocks from ...

In the 45°C heat of the midday April sun, I swing my sledgehammer into the terracotta-varnished lobes of pillow basalt ...

Water may have been shaping Earth’s deep interior far earlier than many geologists thought. In rocks more than 3 billion years old from Western Australia, a research team found chemical signs that ...

Plate tectonics – the drifting of continents – may have got under way at least 3.2 billion years ago and could have played a part in the evolution of life, a study of the magnetism of ancient rocks ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The researchers studied the East Pilbara Craton formation in Western Australia's Pilbara region, seen here. - Roger Norman/Alamy ...

On present-day Earth, plate subduction continuously modifies the chemical composition of the convecting mantle, and various mantle sources linked to these processes have been widely studied. However, ...

The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make ...

Earlier study of the region had shown that the spreading in the area occurs at an average rate of a bit over 60 millimeters a ...

New finding contradicts previous assumptions about the role of mobile plate tectonics in the development of life on Earth. Moreover, the data suggests that 'when we're looking for exoplanets that ...