Scientists have found that 4.02 billion year old silica-rich felsic rocks from the Acasta River, Canada – the oldest rock formation known on Earth – probably formed at high temperatures and at a ...

Geologists think early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where jet-black lava fields extend as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides rise steeply above the clouds and stark black-sand ...

Some of the Earth’s oldest rocks may have formed from the high temperatures of meteorite impacts, a new study reports. Granite-like, or felsic, rocks in northwest Canada dating back to the Earth’s ...

The grinding of giant chunks of Earth's outer layer — responsible for burping volcanoes, crushing temblors and burgeoning mountains, among other things — may have started half a billion years earlier ...

The rocks at the surface of the modern Earth are broadly divided into two types: felsic and mafic. Felsic rocks are generally relatively low density — for a rock — and light in colour because they are ...

Plate tectonics – the process that shapes Earth’s surface and causes earthquakes – may have begun at least half a billion years earlier than thought. And it may have been triggered by staggeringly ...

Top: Map of thorium concentrations near Compton crater on the lunar far side. Bottom: LRO view of the felsic highland volcano. After Jolliff et al. (2011), Nature Geoscience 4, 566. The flood of new ...

Old school geology can’t really be done by helicopter. It requires boots and hammers on the ground, interrogating rocks until they give up their identities and reveal their histories. Planetary ...

As NASA’s MAVEN mission heads toward Mars, scientists say they’ve discovered highly unusual, light-colored rock on the mostly dark-toned Red Planet – and two teams have dueling ideas of what such pale ...

Scientists have found that 4.02-billion-year-old silica-rich felsic rocks from the Acasta River, Canada -- the oldest rock formation known on Earth -- probably formed at high temperatures and at a ...